Priscilla Bell Lamberty

Priscilla Bell Lamberty is a Black & Taino painter and arts educator born and raised in Lenapehoking (Philadelphia). Her public murals and portraiture center themes of identity and cultural heritage, looking at what it means to be Taino historically and today. Her mother’s family left rural mountains in the 1960s with the promise of upward financial mobility in Philadelphia, where they adjusted to urban life and factory work. While assimilation was prized publicly in that era, the family kept traditional culture alive at home by passing on knowledge and food customs, as well as keeping backyard gardens and cultivating herbs for medicinal purposes.
For Project Antelope, Priscilla created poster versions of drawings, etchings, and paintings. Her images of Taino people combine a sense of tension between rural and urban, material and ethereal, fragmentation and wholeness. Priscilla began making art in community college and went on to earn a bachelor of fine arts degree from Moore College of Art and Design. She has taught art to students of all ages for 20 years, and currently teaches online classes for adults through Fleisher Art Memorial, a community arts space in Philadelphia.
› Listen: Project Antelope Presents Priscilla Bell Lamberty