Dadme La Muerte Que Me Falta (Give Me the Death I Need) | Mahari Chabwera

$8,000.00

SOLD

Pt. 1 of La Mujer Salvaje Triptych

Part one of the La Mujer Salvaje Triptych. In Mahari's work, Blackness and Womaness are in consort with the elements of the universe. She uses beadwork as meditation, weaves celestial bodies with tiny glass seed beads, upholstery thread, color, and repetition to invoke Spirit. As choreographer Sanchel Brown puts it, "time spent in rhythm creates portals." This painting is a portal — to self-mythologization, to the energy body, to a death that makes room for the next life.

Mahari Chabwera is a visual artist and curator making tapestry paintings at the intersection of meditation and self-mythologization. She holds a BFA in Painting & Printmaking from VCU and will begin her MFA in Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Fall 2026. Her work lives in the permanent collections of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum and the University of Virginia, and she’s exhibited with VMFA, VMHC, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

4 x 5 ft
Oil, shells, acrylic, and fabric on stretched canvas
2020

Pt. 1 of La Mujer Salvaje Triptych

Part one of the La Mujer Salvaje Triptych. In Mahari's work, Blackness and Womaness are in consort with the elements of the universe. She uses beadwork as meditation, weaves celestial bodies with tiny glass seed beads, upholstery thread, color, and repetition to invoke Spirit. As choreographer Sanchel Brown puts it, "time spent in rhythm creates portals." This painting is a portal — to self-mythologization, to the energy body, to a death that makes room for the next life.

Mahari Chabwera is a visual artist and curator making tapestry paintings at the intersection of meditation and self-mythologization. She holds a BFA in Painting & Printmaking from VCU and will begin her MFA in Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Fall 2026. Her work lives in the permanent collections of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum and the University of Virginia, and she’s exhibited with VMFA, VMHC, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

4 x 5 ft
Oil, shells, acrylic, and fabric on stretched canvas
2020

Mahari Chabwera | Painting & Mixed Media | Crone House Richmond VA

Mahari Chabwera (Newport News, VA) is a visual artist making tapestry paintings at the intersection of meditation and self-mythologization. Her practice employs materials that absorb and receive light. Using glass seed beads, tempered glass, fabric and shells, she works through ideas of energy and illumination.

Chabwera holds a BFA in Painting & Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s participated in residencies with Vermont Studio Center, 1708 Gallery, and The McColl Center. This Fall she will begin pursuing her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Mahari has received awards from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Peale Museum, The Maryland State Arts Council, and Art Matters. Her work’s been acquired by The Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and The University of Virginia for their permanent collections, as well as being exhibited in numerous galleries and institutions including The Virginia Museum of History & Culture, and The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2025 Chabwera participated in NADA Miami Art Week, and this summer she will be exhibiting new work in her first international exhibition with Affinity Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In my work I use shells, beads, seeds, glass, oil paint, and fabric to explore what Ntozake Shange calls “bein’ alive, bein’ a woman and bein’ black” (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf).

My work takes the form of large-scale tapestry paintings where self-possessed figures are in consort with the cosmos, and intimate bead weavings where tiny glass seed beads, repetition, and color are used to invoke Spirit for benevolence and guidance. Beading is time-intensive. As a process-driven craft practice it creates a rhythm. “Time spent in rhythm creates portals.” (Sanchel Brown, Choreographer and Creative Midwife).

In my work I use portals or “melting times" as opportunities to transmute my emotions and speculate about the substance of existence. My beadwork is centered in the idea that everything is cyclical and occurring simultaneously. Beading in spirals, concentric circles and vesica pisces shapes allows me to call on the forces of creation that bring forth growth, death and transformation, to examine my own energy and the energy around me.

My practice is rooted in “imagining what cannot be verified”, a reference to Saidiya Hartman made by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, in Ezili's Mirrors. I am devoted to exploring Womanness and Blackness as divinely fluid and constantly shape-shifting. I am interested in the ways we as Black people reach for the mysterious unknown to author our own existence. In Black Utopias, Jayna Brown affirms that, “This is utopia : the moments those of us untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress here on earth celebrate ourselves as elements of cosmic effluvium.”

@maharichabwera