This event was recorded on Nov. 10, 2022 at Anderson Ranch Arts Center during the 2022 Fall Lecture Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
The paintings of Calida Rawles (b. 1976, Wilmington, DE; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) merge hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Situating her subjects in dynamic spaces, her recent work employs water as a vital, organic, and historically charged space. For Rawles, water signifies both physical and spiritual healing as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. She uses this complicated duality as a means to envision a new space for Black healing and to reimagine her subjects beyond racialized tropes.
Rawles received a B.A. from Spelman College, Atlanta, GA (1998) and an M.A. from New York University, New York, NY (2000). Solo exhibitions have been organized at Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2021); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including A Shared Body, FSU Museum, Tallahassee FL (2021); Art Finds a Way, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2021); View From Here, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Rawles created the cover art for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s novel, “The Water Dancer,” and her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, Perez Art Museum Miami, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.