The modern beauty I capture in my black women art places Black women as the main characters in our own stories — not supporting roles, not decorative figures in someone else’s frame, but the undeniable center of it.
Walking through galleries today, standing in front of works by Mickalene Thomas and Amy Sherald, I think back to when these same spaces held no reflection of us at all. Now we don’t just hang on the walls — we’re reshaping what the walls mean, who they speak to, and whose stories they were built to tell.
Living Through a Renaissance
We are right in the middle of a Black women’s art renaissance, and my Black Women Empowerment Art is one small part of this incredible, still-unfolding moment.
Major institutions now compete for works by Black women artists. Museums that once turned Elizabeth Catlett away now pay millions for contemporary Black feminine art. But the deeper shift, the one I feel most, is that we are no longer waiting for institutional approval. We are building our own platforms, writing our own definitions of success, and shaping our own visual language — one that doesn’t ask permission to be called magnificent.
Rewriting Beauty Standards
When Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold began creating in the 1960s, they showed us that quilts could be high art and that everyday objects could become sculpture. They proved beauty lives outside the traditional frameworks — and reminded us those frameworks were never neutral to begin with.
My Black art painting carries that idea a little further. The women in my portraits are not beautiful “for Black women” — they are beautiful, full stop. Black Women Art surrounded by stars doesn’t justify their beauty; it celebrates it with no qualifier, no asterisk, and no apology attached.
Digital Democracy
Working digitally changes everything about who gets to see beauty and who gets to define it. My Black culture art can exist everywhere at once — on a phone screen in a small town, on a laptop in a classroom, on a shared post that crosses continents in seconds. A girl in rural Alabama can see herself reflected without buying a plane ticket or waiting for a gallery to finally open its doors to her.
That accessibility matters to me more than I can say. When beauty stays locked inside exclusive galleries, it ends up serving exclusivity. But when it spreads freely, it becomes something democratic — a living, breathing conversation instead of a guarded collection behind glass. That is a big reason I chose digital over traditional media. The work should travel to people, not wait for people to travel to it.
Grounded in Reality
Artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier photograph Black women in everyday settings — hair salons, kitchens, front porches. No exotic backdrops required. The beauty already lives in the authentic, in the lived and the familiar, in the spaces we actually move through every day.
My pro Black art grounds finds that same celestial beauty rooted in something real. Yes, stars and cosmic imagery surround these women. But they could just as easily be your neighbor, your teacher, or someone you pass on the street every morning. The extraordinary never erases the ordinary — it simply uncovers what was always there waiting to be noticed.
The New Economy of Beauty
These days, Black artwork featuring Black women commands top prices at auction. Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama reshaped what institutional portraiture could be — and who it could honor. We have moved from the margins to setting the standard, from being overlooked to becoming the reference point everyone measures against.
My Black Women Art Royalty Series reflects that exact shift. Each portrait assumes belonging instead of arguing for it. These are not alternative beauty standards — they are quietly becoming the new default, the baseline from which everything else is measured.
If a portrait like this speaks to you, I can place you at the center of that same beauty — whether for yourself or as a deeply personal piece for a sister, a mother, or a daughter who deserves to see herself this way. You deserve to be documented in this historic moment: seen fully, celebrated completely, and rendered with all the cosmic magnificence you already carry. Commissions start at $2,000.
Long after the auctions and the headlines fade, what stays is the simple, lasting record of who we were and how beautiful we always knew ourselves to be. That is the legacy I hope this work leaves behind.