Paula Mans
Images of Mans’ current work.
Paula Mans is a Washington, DC-based mixed media collagist and art educator. While Mans is a native Washingtonian, she spent many of her formative years living in Tanzania, Mozambique, Eswatini, and Brazil. Her experiences throughout Africa and its diaspora shaped her identity and informed the development of her artistic voice. Mans views collage as emblematic of the interconnectedness of the African diaspora. Just as the dispersed people of the Diaspora are tied together by the thread of ancestry, in collage disjointed pieces are fused to communicate one story. Mans’ work has been acquired by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank and featured in institutions such as the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, the New Bedford Art Museum, and IA&A at Hillyer. Mans is a Sustainable Arts Foundation grantee, a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Visual Art Fellow, a Fulbright Research awardee, and a graduate of the Boston University College of Fine Arts. Mans was both a presenter and the conference manager for Women and Masks Conference in 2021-2022.
Mans, a graduate of BU’s Online Masters in Art Education, has a long-standing pedagogical practice, with a background in both high school art and Reggio Emilia-inspired early childhood teaching. Her experiences abroad led her to foster an interest in various masking traditions and how they have impacted the practices of contemporary visual artists throughout the continent and the African diaspora. Mans completed the Teaching Africa Certificate through Boston University, during which she created a curriculum for the Boston University’s African Studies Center. Masks and masquerade have been a contentious subject in teaching about Africa, for the obvious reason that they have been taught reductively, in a decontextualized way, and have been appropriated in ways that are not respectful of people’s actual practices they come from. Mans created the curriculum unit: Dancing with the ancestors: A study of Egungun Masquerades and Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, which present a culturally responsive way of teaching about masks that engages Pre-K-K students with mask-making without appropriation, reduction, or reproduction.
Masks made for pedagogical projects.