Destiny Palmer currently is working at Thayer Academy and most recently was an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Palmer is trained as a painter but her work explores the intersections of painting, history and color, allowing it to blur the lines of painting, sculpture and installation. Palmer has participated in exhibitions at Antenna Gallery, The Colored Girls Museum, Automat Collective, Ely Center for the Arts, Vandermoot Gallery, Landmark College. Palmer has hosted workshops at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. Most recently Palmer was invited to speak on her relationship to Hans Hofmann at the Peabody Essex Museum.
Palmer explores and investigates what it means to be an artist, educator and advocate for the arts. She has worked with various communities to create public art projects ranging from traditional murals to community engaged/lead mural to digitally created murals. Palmer has worked with MIT, Lifewtr, Saxby’s and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Some of her murals can be found at the Gallivan Community Center in Mattapan, Kendall Square Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. Creating art in public realms has been a focus for Destiny. “I love being able to work with a community to reclaim space. It is extremely important that communities consistently see themselves within their own neighborhood and have ownership of it. Many of these communities are undergoing immense change or are at the bottom of their cities priority list.” Destiny Palmer had the privilege to collaborate and envision a new Codman Square Park as their finalist artist. Palmer was the finalist and collaborating with Doug Kornfield on his revisioning of Gertrude Howes Park. Most recently Palmer is the finalist artist for the interior of Vine Street Community Center in Roxbury. Palmer received her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and Bachelors in Fine Art in Painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Artist Statement
The oldest formal quality in my work is color. The intrigue of its psychology, history, my current focus is on decentering western color narratives and prioritizing my identity in hopes of reimagining a new color system. There are about 59 recorded color systems, a majority of which are scientifically-based. I am captivated by exploring the possibility of a color system that centers history, instead.
My work lies at the intersection of abstraction, history, materials, and color. I hope to blur the lines of narrative and formalism. Labored Bodies is a body of work that investigates colonial American History as it relates to my own identity as a black woman. This series of works that use certain materials to allude to specific historical and sociopolitical contexts, like the Transatlantic Slave Trade, through cotton duck and trade maps, the labor of the working class in America through the use of vintage textiles, and the history of painting through re-contextualization of the canvas and frame. My drawing and paintings explore automatic drawing, asemic and semic through gestural marks and structures, while the fabric works rely on materials to navigate conceptual ideas related to labor, textile history and the body. Symbols like hands, cotton, and map markers allow the work to move around landscape and figuration.
Both studio work and public art provides the opportunity to reclaim space and encourage and nurture conversations in communities. While my murals hold the essence of my previous painting styles, they also center color. A piece that has become the keystone for my work, is a mural within the
F U Shine series. This mural is located at the very place a woman was once enslaved by colonist Samuel Maverick. Her record of existence in America is bound by a journal entry of John Jossyeln, during a visit to Samuel Maverick on what was considered Noddle's Island, present day East Boston and Boston Logan Airport. Outside of the Historical Society, there are few acknowledgements of this black woman, this mural is an attempt to reclaim space and time for her.
In my studio practice I am curious to know: Can color tell us an honest history? Can color reclaim space and reveal histories? Can color be a universal language? Can color tell narratives? My current work is evolving as I bring painting, drawing, and fibers into the creation of sculptural pieces. In my ongoing exploration of color, I have thus far engaged with yellow, black and blue, fuschia, and orange. These series are an attempt to develop formal understanding of color based on the characteristics they take on in relationship to other colors.
Yellow plays on the very expectation that it often represents the sun and is joyous, not overbearing in its function to caution us. I wanted to reconsider yellow as overbearing when it represents heat, smog, and the inability to breathe on a miserably hot day, one that maybe my ancestors didn't have the privilege of skipping.
Black and Blue is a body of work that examines chromatic darks as a way to represent bruising on dark skin. This work hopes to align itself with artists and historians who explore the literal use of these colors as they relate to visibility and invisibility of people and histories.
Fuchsine is the original name for colors described as purplish red, reddish purple, purplish pink or mauvish crimson, often referred to magenta or fuchsia. It is an extra-spectral color, meaning that it is not found in the visible spectrum of light. Rather, it is physiologically and psychologically perceived as the mixture of red and violet/blue light, with the absence of green. Fuschia is a plant native to Dominica and has now become one of the most utilized plants for America home decor. F U Shine is a play on the word Fuchsine. F U Shine is a reclamation of space using the power of healing through art and making.
Orange represents my personal memoir. Utilizing objects to represent gestures and patterns that are found in my two dimensional work, my orange series embodies nostalgia with objects that represent my childhood. Orange has the ability to dominate and force other colors to strain the eye. I am interested in the power dynamics that orange has over other colors and am attentive to the moments orange becomes submissive.