Artist K. Khalfani Ra was born in 1958 in Kingston, Jamaica. Ra received a Diploma in Painting (1983) and a BFA in Painting and Drawing (2015) from the Jamaica School of Art, now known as the Edna Manley School of the Visual and Performing Arts. In addition to his ongoing artistic practice, Ra spent many years as a teacher, lecturing at the Edna Manley School and heading the Visual Arts department at Excelsior High School.
In 1994, Ra received a prestigious Commonwealth Fellowship which allowed him to spend a year in Zimbabwe. Here, he worked as an artist-in-residence at the B.A.T. art workshop and was invited to exhibit in the first Johannesburg Biennial, South Africa.
Critics often describe Ra’s work as provocative; he deals with highly political topics such as Blackness, gender, sexuality, and religion, always in relation to one another. Ra often targets the inaccuracies of popular historical narratives and their effects on current institutionalized practices of racism and white supremacy. Of his work, Ra writes that it “is the process of weaponizing aesthetics in service of truth. I am concerned with the decolonization of the Black being/body.” Common “weaponized” aesthetic features of his work include the use of Bible pages and the weaving of text across the image.
Ra’s work has been shown in many exhibitions across Jamaica, including the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Biennials from 2008-2017 and exhibitions in local galleries such as The Olympia and Mutual Life. In the United States, Ra’s work has been featured in many group shows, including Infinite Island (2007, Brooklyn Museum, NY) and Caribbean Crossroads of the World (2012-13, Queens Museum of Art, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY). His work has also been shown at the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT; and the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington, D.C.