You Are My Other Me

FEBRUARY JAMES (B. 1977)

You Are My Other Me

signed, titled and dated 'YOU ARE MY OTHER ME FEBRUARY JAMES 2021' (on the reverse)

oil, oil pastel, acrylic and acrylic ink on canvas

30 x 70 inches (76 x 178 cm)

Executed in 2021.

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, New York

EXHIBITED:

Los Angeles, Wilding Cran Gallery, February James: (Don't) Take Me With You, September-October, 2021.

NOTES:

Born in 1977 in Washington, D.C., February James is a contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. Working largely outside traditional academic frameworks, James has cultivated a highly personal visual language that explores Black identity, femininity, spirituality, and emotional interiority. Her works frequently center Black female figures rendered through expressive gestures and layered symbolism, collapsing distinctions between portraiture, abstraction, and psychological narrative. Drawing upon memory, intuition, and diasporic cultural histories, James creates compositions that celebrate vulnerability, resilience, and self-possession while challenging conventional representations of the Black body.

Executed in 2021, You Are My Other Me exemplifies the artist’s emotionally charged approach to figuration and relational storytelling. Rendered in oil, oil pastel, acrylic, and acrylic ink on canvas, the work unfolds across an expansive horizontal composition that suggests dialogue, mirroring, and interconnectedness. The title evokes themes of duality and shared identity, positioning the figures not as isolated subjects but as reflections, companions, or extensions of one another. James’ gestural handling of paint and line imbues the work with a sense of movement and immediacy, allowing the composition to oscillate between intimacy and monumentality.

The artist’s layered surfaces and vivid palette create an atmosphere that feels simultaneously dreamlike and psychologically acute. Areas of loose abstraction dissolve into moments of sharply articulated form, producing a visual rhythm that mirrors the complexity of emotional connection. James’ figures often exist within undefined spaces, untethered from conventional settings and instead situated within states of feeling, memory, and spiritual resonance. In You Are My Other Me, this ambiguity becomes a source of strength, allowing the painting to operate as both portrait and meditation on empathy, kinship, and self-recognition.

February James’ work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally, including presentations at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), and galleries such as Wilding Cran Gallery, where You Are My Other Me was exhibited in the artist’s 2021 exhibition (Don’t) Take Me With You. Her work has earned growing critical attention for its dynamic fusion of abstraction and figuration, and for its powerful engagement with Black subjectivity, spirituality, and emotional agency within contemporary art.