Phyllis Galembo

Artist Bio

Phyllis Galembo has produced an impressive body of photographs depicting the physical character, costumes, and rituals of African religious practices and their diasporic manifestations in the Caribbean and South America. Using a direct, unaffected portrait style, Galembo captures her subjects informally posed but often strikingly attired in traditional or ritualistic dress. Galembo’s subjects level a penetrating gaze at a photographic interpreter who has managed to collapse, for a moment, the cultural, racial, and economic distance between herself and them. Galembo’s photograph, Three Painted Boys, made during Carnival—with one standing in the foreground, one leaning against a graffiti-covered wall and another squatting on the right—are splattered in thick, rich red and green pigment, their eyes locked on the camera in a tableau of ethnic color, social mystery and a powerful sense of personal identity.