Three Saints by Devynity Wray

Devynity Wray, Three Saints, 2020, Pencil, Ink, Watercolor and Collage on Paper, 11 x 17 inches,

Three Saints is a gathering of the Black holy in a sacred space. The forms are rendered in the shapes of trees and buttressed with textured paper that echo wood patterns. As a Black American woman, my heritage has a three-pronged tie to trees – the grounding of the American roots, my people’s connection to the tilling and fomenting of this ground and the abysmal legacy of lynchings. I use wooden elements to have discourse among all these temporal planes

Devynity Wray is a visual artist and writer from Queens, NY whose work makes the trajectory of the African diasporic heritage, experience and legacy prominent. Ever inquisitive about history and how human ecosystems interact with one another, Wray’s work is an excavation of Blackness steeped in the wealth of knowledge the artist has acquired from her love of African literature and Hip-Hop music. Enamored with art at an early age, Wray attended F.H. LaGuardia High School of Music, Art and the Performing Arts where she studied as an art major. As a writer, Wray earned her chops on New York’s slam poetry scene making the Nuyorican Poet’s Café her stomping ground. She was a Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam Finalist and team member in 2002. Her team went on to rank 3^rd that year in the National Poetry Slam Competition held annually among teams from all across the country. She received her BA in Africana, Puerto-Rican and Latino Studies from the City University of New York’s Hunter College in 2007. In 2008, she was invited to perform her words at the Essence Cares portion of the Essence Music Festival by Susan Taylor. One of her poems, “Black Gurl Manifesto”, was published in Hill Harper’s bestselling book, Letters to a Young Sister in 2008. She is a Cambridge Writer’s Workshop alumna having completed their intensive retreat held in Granada, Spain in 2018. She was awarded an Artworks, Inc. fellowship by Jamaica Arts Learning Center in partnership with the Jerome Foundation in 2019.  Wray has an MFA from Lesley University