Angela Pilgrim (b. 1991, New Jersey) is an artist whose work has been featured in publications such as Pressing Matters, The Creative Independent, and The Getty Archives. Her work is part of private and special collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and the Newark Public Library. Pilgrim has exhibited in Black Histories, Black Futures at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, and the Gadsden Museum of Art. She has also had solo exhibitions, including Rooted in Spirit at Sarasota Art Center and New Growth at The Center for Contemporary Art in 2024. In 2024, Pilgrim was a finalist in the printmaking category for the New Jersey Council of the Arts Fellowship Award. She serves as a board member of Frontline Arts (formerly the Printmaking Center of New Jersey) in Branchburg, New Jersey. Pilgrim has received several grants and awards, including the 2020 Newark Artist Accelerator Grant, a grant from Peters Valley School of Craft through The New Jersey Arts and Culture Renewal Fund of the Princeton Area Community Foundation, the Newark Arts Community Grant (NACG), and the 2023 and 2024 Creative Catalyst Grants from The City of Newark. Pilgrim divides her time between New Jersey and North Carolina.
Artist Statement
My work engages with Black subjectivity through the lens of the Black female gaze, centering figurative representations of the body as a site where personal experience, cultural and ancestral memory, historical legacies, and emotional complexity converge. Utilizing portraiture, printmaking, pattern-making, and mixed media processes, I interrogate the layered constructions of beauty, spirituality, self-reflection, and the complexities of desire, vulnerability, and power as they manifest within Black diasporic identities. Seated in the fluid histories of the African diaspora, my practice embraces hybridity—a negotiation between inherited visual languages, contemporary material practices, and the embodied knowledge of Black womanhood. My work functions as a visual archive of Black diasporic presence—a site where diaspora, hybridity, and subjectivity intersect. By positioning the Black female body as both subject and author of its own visual and cultural legacies, my practice seeks to cultivate new modes of seeing and being seen, reframing Black presence as inherently self-defined, nuanced, expansive, and emotionally and physically real.
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