When We See Us: a Solo Exhibition featuring artist LaKisha Blount

Upon first arriving at LaKisha Blount’s home studio, one is greeted warmly by the artist and her big, friendly dogs. The front door opens into an expansive living room that doubles as her studio because the room she was using became too small and limiting for her work, which has increasingly taken center stage. She offered me a drink when I got there and showed me around the place. Soon after we sat down, she walked over to her easel, picked up her brushes and worked on a large piece while we were talking. Paintings in various stages are everywhere in her home - on the walls, lining the hallways, and surrounding her worktable. They are displayed alongside vintage family pictures mapping many generations, African sculptures, Blount’s mixed media fiber-based sculptures, plants, and black-and-white photos reminiscent of film stills that the artist made during her years as a student at Western Carolina University, where she earned her BFA in Graphic Design in 2005. 

When We See Us is LaKisha Blount’s first solo gallery exhibition, consisting of nine figurative oil paintings ranging in size and one mixed media sculpture constructed from a tire and colorful, handwoven yarn, representing memories and aspects of her life experiences and the people in her inner circles. With a limited palette dominated by deep warm blue tones and rosy pinks and reds alongside deep brown, black, and white, Blount creates dreamlike scenes with loose, gestural stains combined with areas of textured topographies of thick oil paint built up in successive layers. Imagery morphs and takes shape on the surface, hinting at a sculptural presence through the ridges of marks made with thick, unadulterated paint. Citing Danielle McKinney and Jean-Michel Basquiat as artistic influences, the artist aims to uncover the depth of emotion that emanates from the rituals of everyday life from her distant and recent memories of the people and moments that shape her world. Occasional text passages and repeated motifs are threaded throughout: In one painting, flowers on a nightgown are echoed in a portrait. Elsewhere, a man holding a pink balloon with a forlorn, soft gaze wears a sweater depicting African patterns that show up in other works, including painted directly on some of the gallery walls.  

LaKisha Blount was born and raised in the historic Black community of Texana, located in Murphy, North Carolina. In conversation, she describes many of her family memories as rituals that contain layers of signification and complexity. Mining her experiences and generational stories of Black mountain life in Appalachia through her figurative oil paintings, Blount’s subjects are representative of her connection to real people in her life, from people she grew up with to the matriarchs of her family. Narrative content is woven throughout her work, with subjects that describe moments of daily life such as Sunday Tag, depicting two little girls playing tag after church outside of her father’s church in Waynesville, North Carolina. A more surreal painting, Fontana Rising, is a vision of the destruction of multiple rural mountain communities in Swain County, Western North Carolina that were intentionally flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1940’s to create Fontana Lake and Fontana Dam. The inhabitants of this region were offered a small amount of money for their land, which they were informed was to be taken from them whether they agreed to sell or not. In Blount’s moody and haunting painting, a man sinks into– or rises from– the water, with trees growing in the place of hair. She describes this scene as a vision of the lives of those displaced Black, Indigenous, and Irish families whose histories were submerged and erased. 

Keenly aware of every nuance, Blount chooses everything carefully, giving us keys to unlock her narratives. For example, her figures are frequently clothed in white, suggesting innocence in a threatening world. The physicality of the canvas and the flatness of the picture plane are emphasized in the negative spaces that collapse into abstraction, pattern, and fields of color. Her subjects are pared down to essential gestures and contours, with faces silhouetted or gazing intensely at the viewer, or at something far away- eyes open and sometimes closed, as if metabolizing layers of emotion. 

Blount is what some of us might call a ‘painter’s painter’: she starts with an idea that is still open-ended so that it can be modified and encountered as it is made, through a process that involves paying careful attention to what the painting is telling her rather than asserting directorial control.  Subjects and their environments shift and move and are covered up and excavated as the artist paints for long hours, often working deep into the night. Pointing to a work in progress featuring a victorian-esque portrait head in silhouette against a soft rose-pink ground during my studio visit, she explained: “She’s a self-portrait– for now, at least. That may change as I work on her more.” She spoke of the way that Black women are collectively described and imagined as angry and powerful, and that in part, this painting claims a space for the softness, femininity and sweetness that is constantly denied them: “If you look too soft, you’ll be taken advantage of. If you look hard, you’ll be perfectly fine– or at least that’s what I tell myself. So the portrait is hard within that softness, and the trees in the body signify that this area, this land, the mountains, are part of my DNA– it’s in me; it’s fixed me to the canvas. I cannot move. I cannot leave. Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I don’t know. That’s just how I see myself- along with some ancestral markings, living in a pink and white world.”

Mother, a depiction of a large shadowy head in mostly blue and black, is representative of strong women in the artist’s lineage, be that grandmothers or mothers. Every matriarch in the Blount family, she explains, is called Mother. One of her eyes is covered by Hydrangea blossoms - the family flower - and the other is closed. LaKisha says that the eyes being closed gives the viewer a chance to put themselves into the situation or place, which feels particularly poignant in her deceptively simple painting. The head fills the canvas and pushes against the edges of it, and deep red lips contrasted with hints of cobalt blue emerging behind her shadowy and mysterious face, reminiscent of Odilon Redon’s meditative portraits and figures embedded within flowers in vivid semi-abstracted spaces. There is a striking elemental straightforwardness and sweetness in this and many of Blount’s portraits, all of which is complexified here by worlds within worlds of experiences lived through generations of women collapsed into one somewhat impermeable, dreaming face. In this way the portrait becomes holy.

The outlier in the show is 23 and Me, a mixed media sculpture made from a used car tire that is painted in white and gold and written on with clues to Blount’s genealogical makeup. Colorful yarn is knotted and woven over the tire as a visual representation of the percentages that make up her DNA, inspired by indigenous cultures that use knots as a way of history keeping. She imagines each knot representing a person or a time or a place, with the distance between a knot can signify a length of time. It is vaguely reminiscent of a dreamcatcher. The car tire suggests time moving forwards and backwards, and the abstractly knotted yarn extends into loose strands implying the fluidity of time. The entire piece almost looks like another portrait, one with elaborately knotted and flowing multi-hued hair. 

Two larger, more narrative works feature more than one figure. Take Me to The Water is a depiction of Blount’s memories of baptisms in the river. In conversation about the piece, she recollects an exquisite scene: people who looked just like her in white robes marching into the river one by one to get dunked, one of them being her brother. In her depiction, three figures hold on to one another, surrounded by soft washes of deep, warm blue, close up and with no horizon line, as if we could enter the cool river with them. Lovely, on the other hand, is about memories of getting her hair done before church by her grandmother, who is wearing a Mumu with apple blossoms that LaKisha remembers fondly. The head of the matriarch is cropped out of this composition, centering the main character, head tilted with eyes closed, “reveling in an experience that every Black girl has”, she explains. It is almost as if the head of the girl is resting in the comfort of being held by her grandmother’s skilled hands, a shared experience being remembered by both the girl and her grandmother. The large-scale, flattened picture plane, and rough-hewn forms transform this intimate bonding experience into something more. Whereas painterly realism might sentimentalize, fetishize and objectify the figures in a scene like this, Blount makes them monumental: they traverse into the real real, owning the space they occupy unapologetically and with ineffable beauty. 

Mira Gerard

July 2024

When We See Us will be on view at Tyger Tyger Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina through August 10th, 2024. An artist talk will be held Thursday, August 8th from 6-8 pm. 

About the Artist: 

LaKisha Blount has exhibited her work at The Bascom: Center for the Visual Arts, UNCA Highsmith Art and Intercultural Gallery, Slocumb Galleries at Eastern Tennessee State University, Haywood County Arts Council, Ananda West in Asheville, NC, and more. She graduated from Western Carolina University with a BFA in Graphic Design, and was a recipient of the University’s Book Art Award. She was one of twenty artists selected to create a Black Lives Matter mural in Asheville, North Carolina in 2020.