Kacey Arnold is a contemporary illustrator and painter. Born in 1997 and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she currently lives in Chicago. She recently received her BFA in Painting, Drawing,and Printmaking with a minor in Cultural Anthropology at DePaul University. Her work blends art and visual ethnography while paying homage to the marginalized people of color in the Midwest. She is using found symbols and imagery to create a sort of new myth exploring the lives and experience of Black people who are in a sense, native to this area of the United States. Similar in ideology to Afrofuturists her work strives to recontextualize and explore the past and even the future as experienced by African Americans. From a young age, she was encouraged to explore the natural spaces within and around Detroit. Such explorations have had a lasting effect on the symbols, spaces, and palette used in her work.
LAUNCH Invitational