Kimberly Christina Gaines - My Guberment Name

Sondai All!
I am, as the title bar states, Kimberly Christina Gaines. Goddess, Empress, Sister, and Visualist. I handle up on the imagery for the Afro Zen Amazon. I let my sistren know what looks good and... what don't. For me it is about color, balance and texture. Within those elements of art you can surely make things fabulous.

From childhood I have always liked "pretty pictures", making them for myself and others. Hell, in high school when everyone did the practical thing and took typing, I was in art class creating line drawings with the end of a compass on black shiny paper. Anything creative I enjoyed, reading, writing and drawing were my favorites. I taught myself how to paint with my mother's left over paint supplies from the basement. I would sit for hours sketching images from Essence, Vibe... any magazine(thus I have an obsession with magazines) that I could get my hands on. My grandmother and mother both dabbled in drawing. A librarian and teacher respectively, they were both my inspiration for art in general but my uncle was responsible for my love of photography. Sometimes I feel like a broken record but I always have to say it. In a world of color... his camera saw me in black & white and that intrigued me. The image that he took of me definitely inspired the next level of art for me which was photography.

Borrowing my grandmother's 35mm that was collecting dust, I set off to document the underrepresented of Camden Catholic High School in Cherry Hill NJ. We were in the minority of the catholic school, black and latino alike so I set out to reverse that. I created my own documentation of our high school experience. It never actually made the yearbook but it was the beginning of something I loved doing.

Fastforward 2008, I am an Afro Zen Amazon... I have been called boho, also and elitist (not sure how a Camden New Jersey girl can be such a thang) I actually adopted bourgie-boho as a descriptor as of late... (mind you because of the artist in me that may change tomorrow... or 5 minutes from... NOW) Ultimately, I am a creator! From words to images, to playlists, to altars I create and share in this collective and beyond my talents, opinions, and spirit. Welcome to the minds of the collective, remember AZA is I as well as it is...you!