I am Mahalia. I’m a multidisciplinary environmental artist, photographer, designer, and muralist specializing in oil/mixed media painting, analog photography, and digital imagery. I am currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
After specializing in oil painting and recycled/repurposed textiles at fine arts school in Louisville, I began to work more intimately with sculpture and design at the KY Governor's School for the Arts in 2014.
My textured, impressionistic works have earned praise among the emerging Kentucky arts community, and I have been featured in numerous local publications and galleries.
As an artist today, I seek to highlight the complex relationship between art, sustainability, and our natural world. To this end, I rely largely on found, recycled, reworked, and restored materials to create my work.
Ultimately, I seek to use my art form as a vehicle for self empowerment to share pieces of my personal narrative with those around me. I hope that viewers will enjoy realizing their own perspectives on my art and celebrate the connection found within sharing the energy of my work. With my art, I am limitless.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I see that everything is alive. Every living thing exists within its own vibrations, sounds, and feelings. As an artist, I aim to bring this living nature into play through experimental creation, expressive drip brushwork, and bold color palettes that I find emblematic of life’s fluid emotions and experiences.
Through interaction of purpose and accident, I hope to expose what is often camouflaged on the shiny surface of life and the individual. My goal is to evoke this natural fluidity and inspire those who see my work to deconstruct what certain emotions, memories, and experiences might mean for them in their unique lives. For this reason, my creative process often emphasizes collaborative, interactive, and community-centric work.
Faces in my work are left intentionally anonymous—slightly blurred, depicted from the backside or completely faceless—in hopes that viewers will connect more personally with the layers underneath the surface, rather than with the initial identity and analysis often placed on a specific face.
All of my subject matter are deeply personal. Transitional life periods tend to be particularly motivating for my expressive creation. I love piecing together imagined elements from my mind and real aspects of my physical environment (especially natural elements) and fusing them into one cohesive yet deconstructed work.
As a queer female AAPI artist, I find empowerment through being able to fully own, celebrate, and share my personal narrative through my art forms. Too often in today’s world, I find myself or my experiences becoming intertwined or even overwhelmed with narratives and retellings that others choose for me. Through my art, I reclaim what is and always has been wholly mine. Myself, my life, my emotions, my experiences, my stories, my perspective, and my love for connecting through and unveiling the real, lived expressions and experiences that mold our intricate existence.
Features & Exhibitions
May 2023-May 2024 Kentucky Arts Council (KAC) in partnership with Asia Institute-Crane House and the Kentucky Chinese American Association, Traveling Exhibition featuring Emerging Asian American Pacific Islander Kentucky Artists, Various locations across the KY Commonwealth
• May-Jun 2023, Kentucky State Capitol Rotunda, Frankfort, KY
• Sep 2023, The Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY
• Nov 2023, Glema Mahr Center, Madisonville, KY
• Jan-Feb 2024, The Living Arts & Science Center, Lexington, KY
• Murray Convention and Visitors Bureau, Murray, KY
• Apr 2024, Berea Arts Council, Berea, KY
• May 2024, The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, Louisville, KY
May 2023 Frieze New York Multi-Media Exhibition Lume Studios, “Recursive Reflections,” New York, NY
Mar 2023 Group Exhibition The Cliffs Harlem, New York, NY
Mar 2023 Coincidence Studio Group Show in collaboration with FrEQ. Show Vol. II x Jream Factory, Gymnopedie, Brooklyn, NY
Feb-Apr 2023 Louisville's First Bourbon-Barrel Art Exhibit: Barrels of Heart, Frazier Kentucky History Museum, Louisville, KY
• Dec 2022, Bourbon With Heart Artist Biography Feature
• Jan 2023, Distillery Trail
• Jan 2023, WDRB News
• Jan 2023, Bourbon Guy
• Feb 2023, Bourbon With Heart Impact Feature
• Feb 2023, Fazier Release PR
• Feb 2023, TOPS Magazine February Issue
Mar-Jun 2021 Michael Rose Fine Art International Juried Exhibition, “Artists to Follow 2021”
Apr-May 2021 Shoebox Arts LA, Call & Response Round 13,“Collaboration at a Distance”
Apr 2021 Kaffee und Kippen Magazine Feature, “Liberation from Within” + Instagram feature
Apr 2021 Light Space Time, “11th Annual Figurative Exhibition” Special Recognition
Mar 2021 CREATE Arts Center, Tamar Hendel Gallery International Juried Exhibition, Semifinalist
Mar 2021 Fliessen Magazine Feature, “Break the Ceiling (All Female Artists Feature)” + Instagram feature
2015-2019 Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence x Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts x Western Kentucky University, Group Exhibitions, “Murals of the Holocaust/Never Again,” Across Kentucky
Jun 2016 Churchill Downs, “2016 Couture Collection at Downs After Dark,” Louisville, KY
Apr 2016 Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (KMAC) Couture Fashion Show, “Art Walks the Runway," Louisville, KY
Summer 2016 Aquatics Center & Anniversary Murals for the Jewish Community Center, Louisville, KY
I am always open to connecting with likeminded humans.
Please dm / email for collaborations, consultations, commissions, or further inquiries.