Yatika Fields

Rapture $ Woe

Rapture $ Woe foregrounds the dynamic composition and vigorous brushwork that renowned painter, muralist, illustrator, and street artist Yatika Fields (Osage, Cherokee, Creek) is known for. At the center of the blizzard of multicolored brushstrokes, a vaguely discernible animal-like figure draws our focus through a pinwheeling motion that endows the painting with a palpable and frenetic energy. While discussing the work, Fields pointed out that he painted it with the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris in mind and that the feline could be seen as either igniting or extinguishing the flames, a reflection of the artist’s own ambivalence toward the burning of a monument of Western cultural hegemony.