Kelly Sinnapah Mary
For the 2026 edition of Frieze New York at The Shed, James Cohan is pleased to present a solo booth of new work by Kelly Sinnapah Mary. The fair is open to the public from May 14 through May 17, with an invite-only preview on Wednesday, May 13.
Sinnapah Mary will debut new paintings from the series Violette’s Garden, a continuation of her series The Book of Violette. For this presentation Sinnappah Mary has created a familial garden with hand painted walls echoing the works on canvas. The figure of the artist’s grandmother, Violette, emerges through these paintings— a ghostly yet central matriarchal presence and guardian of heritage. Throughout the works, domestic architectures and interiors emerge as permeable spaces where personal and collective memory converge, and where the boundaries between the living and the ancestral, the human and the botanic continually dissolve.
For me landscape is not a backdrop; it is a presence. It observes, contains, and participates. It evokes a collective memory where figures merge with vegetation, and ancestors persist in other forms. These compositions evoke the oral transmission of rimèd razié: plant-based healing practices passed down from generation to generation, often outside institutional frameworks. Beyond the garden, I am thinking of the concept and history of the “plantation plot”, much like the land my grandfather purchased and passed down through my father. This knowledge is not written: it is ancestral, spoken, tasted, breathed, lived, and it inscribes the work within a genealogy - Kelly Sinnapah Mary
In Sinnapah Mary’s paintings, figures are woven into the landscape, their faces and hands bearing motifs drawn from Taíno iconography: a visual language of geometric and symbolic forms developed by the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Functioning as inscription rather than ornament, these markings evoke a precolonial memory that persists within the body despite historical rupture. As a form of non-linear writing, the motifs mark, connect, and transmit, rendering the body as a surface where ancestral heritage, family history, and lived experience intersect.
The series is animated by recurring figures such as Sanbras, Plant Girl, and the chimeric children who take on mutable roles and expand the boundaries of relational identity, thus resonating with the concepts of Édouard Glissant and Suzanne Césaire. For Glissant, identity emerges through relation and transformation rather than from a fixed origin, whereas for Césaire, the Caribbean imagination disrupts imposed forms of culture by mobilizing the marvelous as a mode of knowledge rather than an avenue of escape. These intertwined intellectual currents inform Sinnapah Mary’s conception of painting as a living archive: one in which land, memory, and ancestry remain in a state of continuous transformation.