Inside the Studio

Why the Bees?

NasLia is a blend of my grandtwins, Nasir and Malia. When they were little, I called them my “Bumble Twins”—a nickname inspired by their constant motion, curiosity, and hilarious toddler antics.

I miss them, so the bee in the NasLia Studio logo is a little homage to them.
The studio carries their names, and the bee carries a piece of their story.

Art for the Heart

NasLia Studio is where ideas get to wander and perfection is banned from the room.

It is full of canvases, paint, paper, brushes, thread, yarn, clay, hand-pulled prints, scraps I am absolutely going to use someday, and probably at least one project that started as one thing and decided halfway through that it wanted to become something else. I like having materials within reach because I rarely know at the beginning exactly where a piece is going to take me.

Acrylic is home base. I love its bold color, its immediacy, and the fact that I can build a surface without waiting three business days for the paint to dry. In my portraiture, I use blocks of color rather than trying to blend everything into perfect realism. I want the color to remain visible as color—to help build the face rather than disappear into it.

But when paint just isn't enough, I make hand-pulled monoprints and cut them apart for collage. I sew thread into canvases. I paint clay and attach it to surfaces. I play with texture, pattern, marks, layers, sheen, and materials that give me something paint alone cannot. Sometimes I know exactly why a piece needs something different. Sometimes the thought process is closer to, “I wonder what happens if I put this on there.” This is when I let the art be my guide.

My process involves a lot of experimenting, changing my mind, stepping away, coming back, covering things up, cutting things apart, and occasionally sanding something nearly back to the beginning because it simply is not working. I don't consider those detours separate from making the art. They are the making of the art.

The work itself centers Black women, Black girls, and LGBTQ women of color. I want us present in the work with room for all of it—beauty, confidence, joy, vulnerability, anger, exhaustion, playfulness, contradiction, and ordinary life. My perspective as a Black woman is also part of everything I create, including the abstracts and other work where no person appears at all.

There is room in this studio for serious ideas. There is also room to play. I don't believe every mark needs a grand explanation or every piece needs to solve something. Sometimes I am working through an idea I have carried for years. Sometimes I am fascinated by a shape, a texture, or two colors sitting next to each other. Sometimes a material makes me curious and I want to find out what it can do.

Just as much as curiosity is important, so is accessibility. Art exists far beyond museums, galleries, textbooks, and people who know the approved vocabulary for discussing it. It lives in homes, clothes, music, buildings, hairstyles, quilts, murals, children's drawings, handmade objects, and countless other places we encounter every day. Art is everywhere, and I believe it belongs to everyone.

NasLia Studio is my place to experiment, question, make a mess, say something, make something beautiful, change my mind, and try again.

It's the place that gives me permission to share my thoughts and feelings. I hope you'll find something from my studio that touches you...