Shop Available Works by Michele Pierson

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Artist Statement

My work examines how reverence, rest, adornment, and connection to nature can operate as practices of survival, restoration, and collective care. Through paintings of still lifes, landscapes, interior spaces, and figures, I explore mental, emotional, and spiritual healing through a Black feminist lens. Grounded in womanist, naturalist, and decolonial frameworks, my practice situates painting within lineages of feminist resistance, radical imagination, and beauty-making as political, spiritual, and communal labor, where care itself becomes a form of refusal and endurance.

Working primarily in oil paint, I build compositions that inhabit a threshold space between the material and immaterial—dreams, memory, meditation, intuition, ancestry, and spiritual reflection—where transformation unfolds through self-authored ritual rather than fixed narrative. Objects, bodies, and environments function as both physical presence and psychic residue.

I construct a recurring visual language through symbolic forms that carry layered meaning. Vessels such as vases, bowls, and containers function as metaphors for the body—structures of emotional architecture. Delicate materials, including sheer textiles, plush fabrics, and glass, evoke tenderness and vulnerability. Adornment objects—perfume bottles, jewelry, beads, combs, mirrors—reference ritualized beauty, self-making, pleasure, and sacred presentation. Ritual materials such as shells, crystals, incense, sage, and stones speak to grounding, ancestral presence, cleansing, and transformation. Celestial elements—moons, stars, and planetary light—gesture toward expansiveness, mystery, and interconnected systems, while flora and organic growth suggest cyclical time, regeneration, and return.

Nature functions as both subject and framework within my practice, where its rhythms, cycles, and patterns become a mirror for navigating internal terrain. Informed by traditions of altar-making, spirituality, herbalism, ancestral reverence, and adornment, I construct still life compositions as devotional spaces where everyday objects are charged with the symbolic weight of personal and cultural identity and spiritual resonance.

My figurative work extends these concerns through anonymous or partially obscured Black female figures that resist fixed identity and that operate as sites of projection, softness, and introspection. I challenge histories that have overdetermined Black women through visibility, labor, and objectification. Instead, I insist on Black femininity as expansive, sacred, emotionally complex, and self-determined—capable of holding interior worlds that exceed imposed frames.

Ultimately, my paintings propose care as both material and metaphysical practice, asking what it means to slow perception, return attention to the body, and imagine healing as an ongoing, collective process of becoming.

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Artist Biography

Michele Pierson (b. 1993, Philadelphia, PA) is an artist working primarily in painting, exploring the relationship between inner and outer space through images that move between the material and the immaterial. Grounded in Black feminist frameworks, her work engages themes of reverence, rest, memory, and connection to nature as practices of survival, restoration, and collective care. Through layered, symbolic compositions that draw from dream logic and everyday life, her paintings create contemplative spaces shaped by ritual, reflection, and transformation. Across her practice, she reframes inherited belief systems and positions beauty, care, and healing as personal rituals towards collective liberation.

Michele earned her BA in Studio Art and Art History, magna cum laude, from Spelman College, with additional studies at the University of Ghana and Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants, including the Black Artist Fellowship(Mural Arts Philadelphia, 2024), Jar of Love Grant (ArtNoir x Sotheby’s, 2023), Forman Family Fellowship at The Alternative Art School (2023), Illuminate the Arts Grant (City of Philadelphia, 2021), and multiple residencies and fellowships with The Alternative Art School and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in recent and upcoming exhibitions at Luster Gallery + Studio (Philadelphia, PA), Rush Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Eckert Gallery (Millersville, PA), Abington Art Center (Jenkintown, PA), Ubuntu Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Miami Art Week.

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Education

2015
SPELMAN COLLEGE, Atlanta, GA
Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, Studio Art & Art History
Awards Received: Phi Beta Kappa and Departmental Honors

2014
Study Abroad: University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana

2013
Study Abroad: Syracuse University, Florence, Italy

2023
THE ALTERNATIVE ART SCHOOL, Online
Relevant Coursework: Post-Human Infrastructure and Spoken Spaces

2021
‍NODE CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES, Online
Relevant Coursework: Decolonizing Curatorial and Artistic Practices

2019-2020
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, Philadelphia, PA 
Liberal and Professional Studies
Relevant Coursework: Design Thinking for Social Innovation

Group Exhibitions

2026
The Black Immortality Project, Our House Cultural Center, Philadelphia, PA

Ritual and Spirituality, Luster Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

Dia[spora], Heartbeat Ink Gallery, Athens, Greece

Presence Without Permission, Rush Arts, Philadelphia, PA

Open Call, Black Women in Visual Arts, Online

Soft Light, Luster Gallery + Studio x Hyatt Centric, Philadelphia, PA

2025
Dual Currency: Defiance by Design, Revolt Art Fair, Miami, FL

Shades: Expanding the Language of Black Skin, Luster Gallery + Studio, Philadelphia, PA

Equinox: At the End and In the Middle, Eckert Gallery, Millersville, PA

The Real: Realism to Hyperrealism, Abington Art Center, Jenkintown, PA

2024
Mural Arts Black Artist Fellowship, Ubuntu Gallery, Philadelphia, PA‍

Through a BIPOC Lens: Decolonizing Feminism, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL

2015
Spelman College Senior Art Thesis, Atlanta, GA

2013
Syracuse University Florence Studio Art Student Exhibition, Florence, Italy

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Selected Awards and Residencies

2025
Artist in Residence, Vermont Studio Center

Artist in Residence, Silence Awareness Existence, Arteles Creative Center

2024
Black Artist Fellowship, Mural Arts Philadelphia

Artist in Residence, The Alternative Art School

2023
Jar of Love Grant, ArtNoir x Sotheby's

Forman Family Foundation Fellowship, The Alternative Art School

2021
Illuminate the Arts: Individual Artist Grant, City of Philadelphia

2018
Neighborhood Time Exchange Residency, Mural Arts Philadelphia

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Publications

Women’s Studies Quarterly, Portals, 2026

Create! Magazine, Issue 39, The Water Issue, 2023.