Biography
Sydney G. James, born in 1979 in Detroit, is an African-American painter and muralist who earned her BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2001. After starting her career as an advertising art director in Detroit, she moved to Los Angeles in 2004 to work as a visual artist in film and television, earned a master's degree in secondary education from UCLA, and returned to her hometown in 2011.
Back in Michigan, she quickly became one of Detroit's leading artistic voices and built a monumental mural practice devoted to the representation of Black women. Her work reinterprets the codes of Western portraiture to place African-American women at the center of the narrative, far from tropes of marginalization. In 2017 she was awarded the prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship, and in 2021 she co-founded BLKOUT Walls, a festival dedicated to Black muralists.
Her pieces are shown in galleries in New York and Detroit, but above all on walls around the world — New Orleans, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Worcester, and Ghana. Her commercial partners include Vans, PepsiCo, Ford, the Detroit Pistons, and the Detroit Lions. "I paint us big, beautiful, and strong because we need to know that we are," she says of her practice.
Back in Michigan, she quickly became one of Detroit's leading artistic voices and built a monumental mural practice devoted to the representation of Black women. Her work reinterprets the codes of Western portraiture to place African-American women at the center of the narrative, far from tropes of marginalization. In 2017 she was awarded the prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship, and in 2021 she co-founded BLKOUT Walls, a festival dedicated to Black muralists.
Her pieces are shown in galleries in New York and Detroit, but above all on walls around the world — New Orleans, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Worcester, and Ghana. Her commercial partners include Vans, PepsiCo, Ford, the Detroit Pistons, and the Detroit Lions. "I paint us big, beautiful, and strong because we need to know that we are," she says of her practice.
The site contains a total of 1 artworks by Sydney G. James in 1 countries.
