🔔 CATCH UP: Weekly Artist Feature

Calida Rawles is an American visual artist renowned for her hyperreal, large-scale paintings that center Black figures within expansive aquatic and urban environments. Her work explores themes of visibility, vulnerability, and survival, often using water as both a material and symbolic space to examine history, healing, and social inequality.

Weekly Artist Feature

Portrait of Calida Rawles | Photo by Marten Elder

Calida Rawles (b. 1976, Los Angeles, California) is an American visual artist whose painting practice centers on hyperreal, large-scale depictions of Black figures immersed in water and urban environments. Her work examines visibility, resilience, and the lived experiences of Black communities, addressing how race, space, and environment intersect within systems of inequality and survival.

Her work is currently being featured in “Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides” – Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL, USA (October 24, 2025 – March 1, 2026)

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Working through meticulous realism, reflective surfaces, and layered compositions, Rawles uses water as both a visual and conceptual force. Pools, flooded streets, and bodies in suspension become sites of transformation—evoking histories of segregation, access, and displacement while also offering space for healing, rest, and interiority. The act of submersion disrupts conventional modes of representation, allowing her subjects to exist beyond spectacle or stereotype.

Rawles’s art fuses social history, material precision, and emotional depth—reframing water as a space of resistance, renewal, and possibility. Through painting, she invites viewers to reconsider how Black presence is seen and sustained, foregrounding dignity, vulnerability, and endurance within contemporary life.

Highlights:

Rawles earned a BFA from the University of California, Riverside, and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art.
Known for a painting practice that merges hyperrealism with conceptual inquiry, centering Black figures within aquatic and urban environments.
Major solo exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster (MOAH); the Long Beach Museum of Art; and Lehmann Maupin, New York and London.
Exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries across the United States and Europe, contributing to contemporary dialogues on race, space, and visibility.
Her work is held in significant public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and the Hammer Museum.

Click the link to learn more about Calida Rawles and her work through her Instagram. Watch the video below!

Featured Exhibition

Calida Rawles, “Towner 4 Life”, 2024

“Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides” – Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL, USA (October 24, 2025 – March 1, 2026)

This solo exhibition by Calida Rawles presents immersive paintings and video works that position water as both a site of vulnerability and renewal. Through luminous, hyperreal depictions of Black figures submerged, floating, and moving through aquatic spaces, Rawles explores histories of access, segregation, memory, and healing—inviting reflection on how bodies navigate survival, rest, and transformation.

Past Exhibitions

“This Time Before Tomorrow” – Lehmann Maupin, London, United Kingdom (September 11 – 27, 2025)
"Away With the Tides" – Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN (March 19, 2025 - September 7, 2025)
“Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides” – Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, FL, USA (June 27, 2024 – February 2, 2025)
A Certain Oblivion – Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (November 9 – December 16, 2023)