Kemar Keanu Wynter
Terrains
Over the last eighteen months, the graffiti-adorned rowhouses, warehouses, bars and box-trucks surrounding Kemar Keanu Wynter’s Ridgewood studio have served as a bountiful visual terrain to glean inspiration from. On regular walks to the corner store or coffee shop, he photographs images of this ever-evolving environment to build a digital archive around which these latest works take form.
Whether as slow, chunky blocks or sinuous, hazy scrawls, each graffiti tag is a writer’s individual stamp. In these public interventions, gestural mark take precedence over a universal legibility–each piece serving as a personal endeavor to record one’s presence in the world. As tags are covered up, repainted, and overwritten, they point to a layered accumulation of information and to a community of individuals in dialogue across the same visual field.
In Terrains, his latest suite of works on paper, Wynter translates the textures and gestures of these tags into his own visual Patois. Pulling recurrent words from recent conversations or texts in the last year, they become the source point for color and composition. Shifting between additive and reductive modes between sessions, each finished watercolor and gouache painting serves to echo the textures and touches seen in tandem around Ridgewood.
Every composition begins with a pigmented wash and a sequence of horizontal lines across the breadth of the surface. It initially served as a nod to the countless rolling gates installed on box-trucks and warehouse facades throughout the area. I quickly noticed that those lines were no different than the ruled lines in the pages of a notebook. In a way, a tag is no different than writing your name at the top of a page.
– Kemar Keanu Wynter, January 2026
Arbor, 2026
watercolor, watercolor pencil, and
acrylic gouache on French cardstock
15 × 12 ½ inches (38.10 × 31.75 cm)
KWY1340
Photographs from Wynter’s archive
Gouts of freshly scrawled ink rush down “for sale” postings and “priority mail” stickers binding to the pebble marred corrugation hemming next door’s vacant lot.
Specials, 2026
watercolor, watercolor pencil, and
acrylic gouache on French cardstock
15 × 12 ½ inches (38.10 × 31.75 cm)
KWy1242
Forged silvers, blued by early twilight or emerging dawn.
Ferric etchings chew heraldic adornments down to oxides of cuprum and fool’s gold.
Regalia, 2026
watercolor, watercolor pencil, and
acrylic gouache on French cardstock
15 × 12 ½ inches (38.10 × 31.75 cm)
KWy1239
SOLD
I love seeing walls that have been battled over. Taggers and shopkeepers locked in this constant back and forth of spraying, rolling and blotting one another out. With each layer I work into, I adjust the scale of my chosen word, allowing it to sprawl beyond the bounds of the composition. In that fragmentation, it’s unnecessary for letterforms to be legible–instead they serve as armatures, or scaffolds to infuse weight and gesture into each painting.
– Kemar Keanu Wynter, January 2026
The hazy remnants of weather-worn adhesives hum a static borne of bulletins grown obsolete.
Gossamer, 2026
watercolor, watercolor pencil, and
acrylic gouache on French cardstock
15 × 12 ½ inches (38.10 × 31.75 cm)
KWy1243
To elude the shadow of your forebears, aim forward, build new.
Legacy, 2026
watercolor, watercolor pencil, and
acrylic gouache on French cardstock
15 × 12 ½ inches (38.10 × 31.75 cm)
KWy1240
Wynter’s alchemical process is deeply rooted in chemistry and memory. Born to a family of Jamaican immigrants who settled in Brooklyn, New York, Wynter came of age in a household where love and strong bonds manifested through gatherings and home-cooked meals. Guided by these heartfelt reflections, Wynter developed an artistic style he dubs a “visual Patois,” a unique language through which he can triangulate himself between the Caribbean, New York, and the innumerable geographies, cultures, and cuisines he has yet encountered. Artworks become totems of Wynter’s unique perspective, marking his ability to freeze time and reinterpret his experiences of intimacy and indulgence through sensual hues and feverish gestures. Every tantalizing note he consumes, he transforms into jovial recollections. Like an esteemed gourmand, Wynter contorts, diffuses, and performs pigment to map a haptic sensibility one experiences through taste and ambiance.
– Shameekia Shantel Johnson, 2024
Works by Kemar Keanu Wynter are in the permanent collections of Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas, Austin (TX), the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton (NJ) and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (VA). His practice has been written about in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and CULTURED Magazine.
For more information about Kemar Keanu Wynter, visit his artist page on our website
Artist Page