Tampa Bay artist Ya La’Ford unlocks time and space in latest solo show, 'Henge'

Ya La’Ford’s work is everywhere. Across the country, her unmistakably-stunning geometric patterns appear in corporate offices of companies like Nike, at NFL activations, inside hotels, even on Indy race cars. The 44-year-old’s craft is also part of the everyday lives of Tampa Bay residents.

She’s painted murals on both sides of the Bay and is the force behind large-scale public sculptures like the West Tampa hidden-gem “Boulevard Flow,” a chromed-out orb surrounded by hedges that are also arranged in La’Ford’s signature lines. Her work looms larger than the humans taking it in, but it always invites viewers to look inside and ponder their own outsized role in the world.

And for her latest solo exhibition, the Bronx-born artist and educator brings her work inside, under the roof of Gallery114 on the Ybor City campus of Hillsborough Community College.
“Henge”—which closes on Thursday, Nov. 2—is built around three large monuments that include leg-like half circles and circular tops, all sculpted with the hypnotizing patterns of La’Ford’s other work.

In some ways, the show harkens back to a 2021 HCC show, “Distance,” which La’Ford staged at HCC’s Gallery 221 on the school’s Dale Mabry campus, five miles away. A new sculpture from her on the same campus opens next week and is a reflection of metaphysics and time, specifically the middle of the pandemic, with an eye on the end, or light, that came after. Indoor monuments felt like a good next step.

“There’s a fourth piece that’s bigger and wouldn’t fit in the gallery,” she told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about her latest show.

And it’s fitting that there’s another portal from “Henge” in a totally different room. The show asks the viewer to consider ancient art, and henges from England’s Stonehenge, to Nabta Playa in Africa’s Nubian Desert, about 500 miles south of Cairo, and even the ancient unexplained “Circle of Giants” henge in Israel’s Golan Heights.

“In this show, we’re thinking about time and space,” La’Ford explained. “I think all this is interconnected. It’s beautiful that way.”

That interdependent-ness has been as much of a touchstone of La’Ford’s work as geometry. Themes in her art have always included an idea of helping civilization not just by peering backwards over a shoulder and into the past at ancestral spaces or ceremonial sites, but by looking forward as one does when face-to-face with the monuments at “Henge.”

“Look at the U.S. Every day we’re reconsidering monuments, what they mean—taking some down and putting others up,” she noted. Bringing a monument inside makes the idea of a monolith more modern, and it also lets viewers reconsider travel, death, and bringing the idea of stars and divinity into a gallery setting.

“How can I get us to look at something that is more supernatural or divine or alien-like or otherworldly, and maybe bridge some of these ancient societies.” La’Ford said, noting how henges were once used as celestial clocks. Even the alignment of the circles in the “Henge” monuments feel like they’re supposed to transport the viewer somewhere, a nod to something La’Ford felt when she visited the Stonehenge in the U.K.

“There was this overwhelming feeling that connected me with another time that I was trying to bring to Tampa,” she said about her trip. But La’Ford’s not only looking to the heavens in “Henge.”
She typically includes something ground-rooted in her shows, but for this one, La’Ford skipped pushing the earth into canvas and imported sand from Africa, which was then sprinkled on the gallery floor. “The sand was supposed to just kind of be under the monuments to group them, but as I rooted the henges, I started to also root myself,” she explained. La’Ford spontaneously started painting into them with her fingers.

“My fingers became the paintbrush, and as I started to sweep through, I started to feel a wind moving through me from another time and space,” she said. “I felt like an archaeologist of sorts.”

Last Tuesday, for one of its final acts ahead of closing, “Henge” welcomed dancers and about 100 schoolkids from St. Petersburg’s Mount Zion Christian Academy. The students spent time with La’Ford and then interfaced with the sand underneath the exhibit’s three monuments. The idea, La’Ford said, was to let them just touch the sand and create shapes themselves.

“But I think there’s something that happens when it’s quiet, and you can hear your fingers moving through the sand,” she said. “I think those kids got to catch a little of that wind that moved through me. It was cool to see them travel to another place, too.”
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