Seeing with the Blackeyed Pea:The Art of Letitia Ntofon Posted on October 20, 2009 by Duane Deterville
My first encounter with Letitia Inyang Ntofon’s paintings was in The Black Dot Café located at 1195 Pine Street in deep West Oakland’s Black cultural district known as The Village Bottoms. I have known her for several years but mostly as a poet and writer. Her paintings, especially as they were arranged and installed on the wall in this location gave them an elusive narrative quality that grew the more that I looked at them. They felt like a story without a specific plot that contained many inscrutable details. Of the seven pieces at least two of them are self-portraits and that underlines the aura of autobiographical narrative in the paintings. They are made of found materials in irregular sizes that range from plywood to furniture fragments.
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