Laetitia Ky was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1996. A feminist artist who creates sculptures from her hair, she has made a name for herself as a figurehead in the natural hair movement. She has a degree in Business Administration from Institut national polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro. After graduating, Ky decided to pursue the arts rather than business, and began to teach herself to sew, with the intent of having a career in fashion. At 16, she began losing hair and her interest in the American natural hair movement grew. This was also fueled by growing up and living in a country full of black women but barely having seen a black woman with natural hair.
Ky’s career officially started in 2016 when a Facebook account she followed shared a photo album of twentieth-century, pre-colonial African women and she was immediately inspired to sculpt her hair in a manner similar to the featured women. She posted her sculptures on Instagram where she received a lot of positive response from other black women, and from there she continued to regularly post hair sculptures. In 2017, after one of her sculptures went viral, Ky began getting approached by international magazines.
Her pieces are moments, scenes, statements, emotions, rendered in black afro textured hair. Ky is central to the art. Her sculptures can’t be displayed on a wall or a table. They can’t be bought or taken on tour. Every piece is on her head, extending high up into the space above and around her, a growth of coils and curls that she twists into shapes that seem unfathomable. There are no gimmicks, technological cheats or shortcuts. Ky links hair extensions directly to her own natural afro and then, using a mirror, proceeds to mould both into shapes. If what she wants to build is particularly complicated, she uses wires and glue.
Ky’s sculptors range from the bucolic, to the domestic and the political. There are sculptures of household chores, where Ky’s hair extends into a vacuum cleaner she then grips to clean with; others where Ky is the body of an alligator, crawling out of a swamp, her hair the alligator’s head. There are more shocking ones, where Ky’s hair is a womb – on each side, instead of ovaries, there are two middle fingers – or a vagina with period blood pouring from it. Ky hopes her work inspires other women to speak. Ky’s book, titled Love and Justice: A Journey of Empowerment, Activism, and Embracing Black Beauty takes the reader on Ky’s own journey with her air and what inspires her as an artist.
