Imna Arroyo Biography

Written by Migdalia Salas, Connecticut, January 2024

Imna Arroyo was born in the town of Guayama, on the Caribbean coast of Puerto Rico, in 1951. The artist's familial heritage is of Taino, African and Spanish lineage. The threads of that cultural heritage are interwoven throughout the tapestry of her life. 

Arroyo's foundational training in art-making began in high school, the start of a continuum that later directed her to the Escuela de Artes Plásticas del Instituto de Cultura in San Juan. Moving to New York gave her the opportunity to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1977 and culminated with her studies at Yale University in New Haven, from which she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1979.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s the artist established her studio practice along with a university career as a studio art educator. A yearning for knowledge and search for identity became the predominant theme in her artistic pursuit. The work from the 1980s through the 1990s is informed by her feminist views and inspired by the urge to demonstrate women’s shifts from restricted circumstances toward liberation. In 1992 she solidified her professorial career upon being appointed educator and Chairperson of the Visual Arts Department at Eastern Connecticut State University. 

The beginning of the 21st Century is punctuated by multiple journeys to Cuba to conduct her own ethnographic studies into the field of Yoruba African spirituality, an endeavor that also leads her to Brazil and Nigeria. Upon the dawn of this new millennium, now an established artist and educator, she completes the Sankofa installation (1999) and goes on to create major bodies of multimedia installation work, Legacy (2001), Yemaya (2000-2001), Ancestors of the Passage (2004), Iroko (2017) and Èṣù Elegbá (2022) and Iroko: Los Ancestros.Los Abuelos (2023).  

Today, the artist lives and works in Eastern Connecticut.