Kezia Harrell

Kezia Harrell (born 1994 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, illustration, and performance. A graduate of San Francisco Art Institute (Painting BFA ’17) now living in Fresno, California, Harrell paints fantastical, hyperrealistic worlds of Black femme freedom. Her work draws attention to the histories of white supremacist and misogynoir violence while making space for herself and other Black people to heal and define themselves outside of the white gaze. 
== Life and Praxis ==
For Harrell, identity is a truth north, "what situates us in our lives and leads us through it. The most important aspect of my identity is my memory. I remember all of my selves, from my earliest memory to right now. When I remember, I see myself as infinite." Fueled by memory and lineage, Harrell artistically carves out a space for her voice and power as a therapeutic and world-building process. In a Western world and canon that continues to define human as white, Harrell’s portraits and performances are radical humanizations of Black, fat, and femme people, in the face of the “massive lack in images of self-affirmation and representation for people of color in traditional figurative portraiture.” Importantly, she also animates objects of care, like stuffed animals, painting them as “humanoid” and recategorizing human not by race but by who/what deserves care. Her work is elegy and futurity, a demand for revolution and an invitation into an intimate home for Black survivance. 
== Key Works ==
=== I Hate White People but I Loves You, Performance/sculpture. 2015. ===
Harrell’s remixed Raggedy Ann & Andy dolls and performance passing out fried chicken and watermelon lay bare the “particular perversion” and “racist undertones around the history of slavery and blackface,” in this case, with the "slave doll." Fascinated by the embeddedness of the aesthetics of racism, Harrell satirizes the caricaturing of Blackness. The exhibit received backlash from white people who felt the title was mean, and the gallery, Broadway Studios, initially cancelled the show when Harrell refused to change the title. Harrell received widespread support on social media and, under public pressure, Broadway Studios moved forward with the show. Harrell hoped the work, and the controversy, would open up a conversation about race and racism, believing that “dialogue, knowledge, and acceptance is a grand step towards healing.”
=== Is You Hungry? Oil on panel. 5' x 5'. 2017 ===
Harrell similarly plays with caricatures of Blackness in her painting depicting a basket full of fried chicken and watermelon. Harrell emphasized that in this piece and other works at the time, she sought to bear witness to and create evidence of the histories of racism and indomitable Black joy. Harrell subverts the “inherited self-hatred in the African-American psyche” and the silencing of her ancestors in archives and history books through her art, feeling that her “paintings are an embodiment of flesh and bones that lived and died with no one to tell their stories…[and] are a place that is validating the lives of their descendants.” Here, motifs of food stereotypically associated with Black people provide an abundance to sustain viewers.
=== I Finally Know How to Speak, Marker and gouache on cotton. 22” x 30”. 2021 ===
Commissioned by HBO Max and Human by Orientation, Harrell’s self-portrait, with characteristic bright rainbow colors and whimsy, hyper-realistically conveys a Harrell with surreal clarity and care. While the world dehumanizes Black people, Harrell paints herself as more than human, finding new modes of survival and growth as she blooms, beautiful and well-manicured, with luminous skin and blossoming braids, from the soil. In this self-portrait, Harrell is able to define her being for herself, “outside of the heavy traumas of the past, safe from the perpetuation of the white perspective.”
=== Bliss: Americana Hot Mamma, Oil on birch panel with stretched canvas. 10’ x 6’. 2021 ===
Another self-portrait, Harrell’s monumental painting transports viewers to a hillside where the artist is reclining, at ease with bare face and body. Her bow-tied braids float in a halo around her head while a fantastical, purple-furred cherub blows gleaming sprinkles of light toward her glittering body. Evocative of canonical portraits of naked women by white men which rendered the subjects as passive objects, Harrell gazes at herself, commanding her power and dynamism while offering herself blissful rest. 
== Exhibitions, Fairs, and Commissions ==
=== Shows ===
Ginga, Chandran Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2021
A Spirit of Disruption, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, 2021
Shattered Glass, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2021
Power, YARD Concept, Los Angeles, CA, 2020
In Color, Watts Empowerment Center, Los Angeles, CA, 2020
Fun Hang, Karma International Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2019
Exotify Elsewhere Pt. II, Swim Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Exotify Elsewhere, Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2017
I Hate White People but I Loves You, Broadway Studios, San Francisco, CA, 2015
=== Fairs ===
SELECTION 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London, UK, 2021
=== Commissions ===
HBO Max
Love Watts
New York Times Style Magazine
Category:American people
Category:1994 births
Category:American artists