Pray for Rain explores a metamorphic experience of African migration through the poetic lens of botanical materials that follow these migratory pathways. Pray for Rain plays with visceral poetics of reforming oneself, and pays homage to the invisible experience of becoming that one experiences through migration. Materially, these works are made of natural elements like Sudano-Sahelian sorghum, Besobela (Ethiopian holy basil), okra, and rain to draw attention to the subtle ecologies of migration and the role terrestrial elements collaborate with one’s sense of home.

About the Artist

Ama BE is a Ghanaian artist weaving her life between the US and West Africa. Her work engages the entangled histories of African land stewardship, labor, and migration ecologies, positioning natural elements as both medium and collaborator. Through the use of botanical materials—laden with paradoxical associations of commodification, violence, healing, and spirituality—she explores how the natural world might re-script dominant narratives surrounding Black and African bodies.

Ama’s interdisciplinary approach spans performance, moving image, sculptural organic textiles, and emerging technologies. Her practice is grounded in a sustained inquiry into affective relations with land. Ama explores the quiet metrics of contact between Black/African bodies and landscape to challenge loss and dispossession. An alum of Àsìkò Art School (Cape Verde), RAW Académie (Senegal) and co-editor of the book On Place-based Artist Pedagogies. Ama’s work has been shown at the 15th Dakar Biennale, Ars Electronica Festival (2024), the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art. In 2023, she was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Wherewithal Research Grant for her ongoing project Ngo {palmoil}: a transdisciplinary archive and living inquiry. She holds an MA in Global Creative & Cultural Industry from SOAS, University of London.