Arcmanoro Niles
New York, NY
ARCMANORO NILES
Hailing from Washington D.C. and born in 1989, Arcamanoro Niles attended the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. He earned a BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He currently works and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he shows with Rachel Uffner Gallery on the Lower East Side.
His most recent show there, My Heart is Like Paper: Let the Old Ways Die features large paintings of domestic scenes imbued with rich jewel tones, featuring Niles' signature 'seekers,' small figures representing human whims and the compulsion to seek gratification in the moment. His other 2019 show, on the West Coast at the UTA Art Space, I Guess By Now I'm Supposed To Be a Man: I'm Just Trying To Leave Behind Yesterday, presented paintings that continued the themes presented in the Uffner Gallery show that same year.
Niles work is included in part in the permanent collections of the Dallas Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, New Jersey, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.
Arcmanoro Niles - Brooklyn Studio - 07:19
“I was really always interested in skin tones and really looking at dark flesh and the colors that were in there. I was dissatisfied with how I wasn’t really getting purple, deep red, and all the golden tones that I saw in my skin or my friends or my mom. And so I started using really bright grounds and painting with highly saturated colors like reds and cadmium yellows and layering them to pull out all the color.
When I first started painting this way my plan was to go back and glaze it with brown...but somehow it looks good like this, so I figured I should really just work with these bright colors that I love and see how close I can get it in rendering it to look like flesh.”
“I try to be as honest as I can about the situation or the image or how I was feeling. I feel like there are things that everyone feels, so even though you don’t look like me...a lot of them are just stories that everyone can relate to. You come to it and you look at it, and you have things that you’ve been through so you sort of see a little bit of that there.”
