Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (born 1987), also known as Olomidara Yaya,[1] is an American artist, author, and assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley Department of Art Practice.

[9][10][11] Hinkle was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1987; her experiences with racism and colorism, especially as they expressed themselves in language, were essential to her later response to these ideas in art.

[12] Hinkle was inspired by her mother, herself an artist, who, due to the fact that they lived in the segregated South, was unable to pursue her creative identity.

[13] She lived in Baltimore, MD while studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she sometimes attended local slam poetry events.

"[Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle's] work investigates race, sexuality and history using historical objects in visual and performance art constructs.

"[19] An idea central to her work is the concept, cleverly appropriated from grammatical jargon, of a "Historical Present", which she defines as "the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective".

[21] This culture places great value and emphasis on the community, which can be seen in the ways Hinkle assembles objects together to interrogate the colonial and white gaze.

[22] The presence of this concept in Hinkle's work has a goal: "the Kentifrican figure has a distinct role to heal and empower people who are soft-targets for manipulation and abuse".

For example, The Contagion (2012) shows a young African girl nearly naked, but partly obscured by thick red lines resembling ropes and organic, natural forms.

[15] Her goal is to merge the experiences of inhabiting a black, pregnant body and the thought of the otherness that Condé depicted by expanding on the background of Tituba's life.

Drawing on the collective histories of the artist, her collaborators, and participants, the work includes objects of Kentrifican culture, such as recipes, instruments, clothing, hairpieces, and maps.

Here she is very confrontational with the issues of sex trafficking, kidnappings, murder and other reasons for these disappearances, but at the same time she is creating sympathy and a call to action for these women.

These ethnographic photos sought to brand Black women's bodies as dehumanized figments of hypersexualization and conquest, triggering both repulsion and desire".

[21] These postcards were once used as a tool of French colonists to further the objectification of the women shown and thereby strengthen the power of the viewer, implied to be white and European.

Hinkle "reconstructs and reimagines the women [from the postcards] through vivid drawings and unique placements on the canvas - in a sense restoring their loss of power".