Shani Peters
2009 Swing Space Resident, 77 Water Street
Shani Peters is a New York-based artist born in Lansing, MI focusing in video work, collage, printmaking, and interactive community work. Her work reflects an interest in the power of collective activity, in the identification of the self within the whole, and the cyclical patterns throughout history and generations. It bridges personal experiences with the collective history of Black people. Peters examines this history and its present circumstances through the perspective of family structures as they inherently lie between the self and the whole and are microcosms of larger societal conditions. Peters completed her BFA at Michigan State University and an MFA at The City College of New York. She has exhibited throughout New York, including group shows at Rush Arts Gallery, and the International Print Center New York. In addition to personal and public arts projects, Peters works as a teaching artist with various community organizations.
At LMCC’s Swing Space she is creating a series of collages and a video set/video around ideas connecting present day Harlem to the Harlem of the 1920s and 30s. These works connect the artist to her grandmother and contemporary Hip Hop cultural to Pan-African initiatives of the early 1900s.
