art.wikisort.org - Artist

Laetitia Ky (born 1996, Abidjan) is a feminist artist from Ivory Coast who creates sculptures from her hair.

Laetitia Ky
Born	1996 Abidjan
Nationality	Ivorian
Alma mater	Institut national polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny
Style	Sculpture

Biography

Ky was born in 1996[1] and grew up in Abidjan; her parent divorced when she was young.[2] She has a degree in Business Administration from Institut national polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro. After graduating, she realised she wanted to work in art and design.[2] She began a new career in fashion design, but was soon inspired to change direction by looking at archival photographs of African women's hairstyles.[2] She began creating these new fusions of hair art and sculpture in 2016.[3]

Ky's hallmark style is creating sculptures from wire, thread and her dreadlocks (lengthened with weaves into her natural hair).[4] She calls this style the Ky Concept.[4] These styles express her creativity and increasingly, her politics.[5] Each sculpture takes between twenty minutes and six hours to create.[6] The first iteration of her sculptural hair art involved wrapping braids in African wax print cloth; in 2017 she hosted her first "Ky Braids" workshop to teach the art-form to others.[7]

A music collaboration followed with Di'Ja, whose hair she covered in printed wax cloth inspired by the hair of Himba women.[8]
Ky launched her fashion brand in 2018.[9] Named Kystroy, it aims to be inclusive, using body positive language to describe clothing sizes for example.[10]

#MeToo and Activism

Over time Ky's sculptures have become more political and in 2017 she used her platform on social media to raise awareness.[2] That piece showed a man lifting up a woman's skirt, sculpted from her braids.[2] Also in 2017 she produced a piece that created bulging muscles over her slim arm - this was to raise awareness about bullying, especially the damage it can do in childhood, which Ky experienced.[11]

In 2019, Ky created a new piece which showed a uterus with each Fallopian tube 'flipping the bird' at the viewer.[12] This was in protest at the USA's anti-abortion laws.[12]

Ky is seen by many to be an ambassador for natural hair for African women.[4]

Awards

In 2018 she was selected as one of the top twenty young people for On the Rise Côte d'Ivoire a programme run by L’Association des Conseils en Lobbying et Affaires Publiques de Côte d'Ivoire (ACLAP-CI).[13] In same year she was voted one of the Prix Jeunesse Francophone 3535's thirty-five influential young people in the French-speaking world.[14] The following year she was selected by Paper magazine as one of the top '100 People Taking Over 2019'.[15] At the end of that year, she was awarded a contract as a result of the Elite Model competition social media category, in partnership with TikTok.[16]

References

External links

• Laetitia Ky's Instagram
• Laetitia Ky's Youtube channel

На других языках

---

- [en] Laetitia Ky

---

[es] Laetitia Ky

Laetitia Ky (Abiyán, 1996) es una artista feminista de Costa de Marfil, conocida por crear esculturas con su cabello.

---

---