Charma Le Edmonds: Untold Stories

Curated by Jack Rasmussen
Director and Curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center

As a native Choctaw, storytelling was a part of Charma Le Edmonds’s heritage. And, like the Surrealists before her, she relied on automatic drawing as the basis of her imagery. Her drawings form a layered story within the paintings. This intuitive process creates a psychological depth using veils of layered colors and pattern contrasted with solid blocks of color and intricate detail, mirroring the overlays of experience in our day-to-day lives. They represent the struggle of recovery and of fundamental human conflict. Her art is a search for beauty in nature and harmony between life and death as a source of strength and reflection.

Artist Biography:

Charma Le Edmonds (1955 – 2021) was born in Rapid City, South Dakota and received a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC, in 1986. She was a Native American and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She exhibited work at Tartt Gallery, Washington, DC, Maryland Art Place, Clark Gallery, Boston, MA, Washington Project for the Arts, Hemphill Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She was a recipient of an Individual Artists’ Award from Maryland State Arts Council, a Ford Foundation Grant and was an artist in residence at Yaddo. Her work included painting, sculpture, ceramics, installation, bookmaking and set design.