April Sunami remains grateful for the here and now

A mid-August phone interview with April Sunami began with me apologizing for running late to the call. The Columbus artist quickly put my concerns to rest, however, insisting that she was in no rush and that all was well. “I’m on vacation,” she said, “so I’m fine.”

For a moment, it was hard to square this admission with on-the-ground realities, considering Sunami has two distinct solo shows opening this week – one at Lindsay Gallery on Friday, Aug. 22, and a second at William H. Thomas on Sunday, Aug. 24 – in addition to having recently curated the All People Arts exhibition “It Was All a Dream,” which opened at the South Side gallery on Aug. 7 and runs through Oct. 24.

“Well, you know, I already did all the work, so now I’m just taking a breather,” Sunami said, and laughed. “And this was the only time I could do it between the art going up and the actual openings.”

The break is certainly deserved, landing at the tail end of a tumultuous year in which Sunami mourned the loss of her father, whose August 2024 death for a time left her struggling to regain her footing. “I was trying to find my way back, asking, what am I doing? What am I here for? Am I going to pack up this whole practice and be done as an artist? And if I do, what am I going to do next?” said Sunami, whose dual exhibitions emerged from this period of deep soul-searching. “So, these questions are happening, and all the while I’m making these pieces about girlhood. … And then I’m making this whole other series, which is collage. And I have this treasure trove of images and material to pull from, and so I just dove in.”

The collages completed in this stretch by Sunami will feature at William H. Thomas, with the artist describing the exhibition as an expansion of the work she showed at McConnell Arts Center in January 2024, which dived headlong into concepts such as lineage and ancestry. These will display alongside a series of experimental resin works with titles such as “Keep Dreaming” and “Keep Believing” – motivational messages that began as aspirational and then gradually hardened into an ethos as Sunami built these new bodies of work. 

“I think I was almost talking to myself, like these pieces were my little pep talks,” Sunami said. “I had to really sit down and think about what my brain was telling me right then, and … it was keep hoping, keep living, keep going. And that’s the message that God and my ancestors keep telling me: You can’t stop.”

The exhibition at Lindsay Gallery – a duo show with Katie Kikta collectively titled “What We Carry” – finds Sunami taking the strong, feminist portraiture that has long been a hallmark of her work and applying it to the younger generation. Sunami’s contributions, dubbed “Girlhood,” center the promise and softness of youth, with the artist pulling inspiration from both the time she has spent mentoring young girls in Empowering Young Voices and the reality that her youngest daughter recently turned 15 – an age at which her interests strayed even further from those of her earliest years.

“So, with her permission, I took a lot of the things she used to play with – these Shopkins – and then the pony beads and barrettes and decorative things that girls wear,” said Sunami, who embedded these collected artifacts in the developing paintings, which began to reflect the fleeting nature of childhood and the tumultuous mix of emotions that come with seeing your own kids take those earliest steps toward adulthood. “There’s hope, there’s sadness, there’s longing. It’s all the things. It’s weird. I mean, my oldest is about to be a senior, and Ella just turned 15 and will probably get her driver’s permit pretty soon. … But that’s the goal, right? You obviously want to see your kids grow up. It’s really about the passage of time. And the older you get, the more you realize that time is finite.”

There are other layers at play in the exhibition, too, with Sunami choosing to center softness and empathy in a social and political moment where some have cast these traits as a sign of weakness or somehow undesirable. “I definitely feel like leaning into softness was a reaction to everything else going on,” Sunami said. “It was a way for me to tap into tenderness and vulnerability at a time that is really asking me to be hard and bitter and cynical.”

The dichotomy surfaces most cleanly in a portrait Sunami painted of her youngest daughter, Ella, which the artist titled “I Pray Everyday that You Have a Future to Look Forward To, but I’m Grateful for Here and Now.” 

“And this is really something I do every night, where I pray not just for my kids’ future, but every kid I know and every kid I’ve worked with,” said Sunami, who expanded on the title to include “I’m Grateful for Here and Now” as a means to better highlight the optimism she still feels for the present, and which has been buoyed by the act of creation in these most recent months. “And it’s not about selling it or anything like that. The work is making sure you’re connecting with another human being. So, when somebody comes to me and tells me they really like a piece, it lets me know I’m not alone, they’re not alone. And that’s important. And I feel like that is one of the stepping stones to being okay in this moment.”