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Kellie Romany

American, born Trinidad and Tobago, 1985

Kellie Romany

An abstract painter, Kellie Romany is fascinated by the materiality and properties of paint—its manipulation with outside influences, or lack thereof, within a work. The content of her artwork—abstracted bleeds, clots, rings, cracks, and rippling wave forms—aim to recall relationships between bodies, biology, and race, with a particular interest in exploring phenomena such as natural reactions, the reproductive cycle, and the parts of genetic make-up that are not always easily seen. Using a color palette of skin tones, Romany paints to create portraits that blur the lines of figure and non-representation, looking to the diversity of the human race for connections between our constantly shifting definitions of otherness, race and beauty. Romany states, “This slant on beauty and identity stems in part from my experience as a young woman from a Black/Indian family, my birth in Trinidad, and its juxtaposition to being raised there within a diverse island culture and later in a white-centric small town in the United States.” Romany has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including museum shows at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, Illinois