Community, family and friends, love and dance. That’s the inspiration for well-known, local artist Elisa McKay, who celebrates her Afro-Caribbean heritage in her distinctive collages.
She says her art is like meditation and a form of release. “I celebrate my heritage through my art with respect, honor and love,” McKay adds.
McKay began as a hobbyist, creating special occasion note cards for friends and family. She then progressed from gluing little dried flower arrangements with lace, fabric and ribbons on cards to larger collages featuring silhouettes of people clothed in African print fabric, and found objects of feathers, shells and grass.
McKay says she made a card for a friend who later asked to buy her cards. In 1980 she began packaging her cards in groups of four and distributed them to local gift shops and hotels.
The 4" x 6" cards are still sold in stores and galleries across St. Croix—only now they are printed cards.
Over the years she has created larger collages, up to 20" x 25", and sells prints of the originals.
Her Crucian parents, Ogese and Heidi McKay, whom she dearly loved, celebrated 65 years of marriage and were her inspiration for “Love Walk.”
The piece is a silhouette of a bent-over couple cut from black French canson paper dressed in blue African print fabric from Ghana, West Africa. The background is painted in intense sky blue and grass green acrylics.
“Morning is Broken” is a silhouette of a woman in a red-and-dark-blue print dress dancing with her locks flying up in the air. McKay says the fabric is from a dress of local dancer Atti Bermudez.
She does silhouettes because features and hair personify individuals. “I feel we are all one and belong together,” McKay says calling her works “sistah art.”
Upon receiving a grant, McKay had Nathan Bishop, a designer at Crucian Gold, make silver-and-gold pendants and brooches of her logo, which is a simple silhouette of a lady.
McKay’s prints have been in the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, and the calendar of Island Art and Soul numerous times. She has exhibited her work in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Md., and in both New Jersey and North Carolina.
Locally she has been in the Fine Arts Show at Good Hope School, St. George Village Botanical Garden, Whim Plantation and Maufe Gallery.
McKay and her father, who was also an artist and musician, did a show together at the Reichhold Gallery on St. Thomas. She also did a show at Tillet Gardens there.
Her family called her the “little artist.” She said she did mechanical drawings for furniture her father crafted. The self-taught artist said she took one sculpting class at City College in New York while earning her degree in English. She took her first real art class at the University of the Virgin Islands this year.
McKay was born in Harlem, N.Y. Her parents moved back to St. Croix in 1962, and McKay moved to St. Croix in 1978 with her daughter, Ayanna McKay.
She briefly taught English at St. Croix Central High School and took a leave to care for her parents. She didn’t go back to teaching—although she does give yoga instruction weekly.
She now works as the volunteer coordinator and trainer for Interfaith Volunteer Caregivers.
“My art is a God-given talent and I give glory to God,” McKay says. “I am thankful that I can be creative with the spirit moving me.”
To view McKay’s art, visit www.sistahart.com.
