Artist Statement

I am a Mexican American artist from Texas. I work across painting, collage, performance, textiles, sculpture, and sequential art. My interdisciplinary practice investigates the experience of conversion and the reconciliation of pain through fragmented self-representation. I was raised in Pentecostal Christianity, a faith my family used to harm me; they physically and sexually abused me within it. That abuse fractured the divine order it claimed to offer, leaving the world feeling chaotic and ungoverned. As an adult, I return to Christianity by reimagining God as a nurturing MotherFather figure, offering care and protection where both were withheld. This return is a conversion that is also a reclamation. I call the making of art itself “decreation,” mystic Simone Weil’s theological conception of emptying the self to make room for the divine. Through this emptying, my work gives suffering sacred meaning and treats my survival as a form of sacrament. In my work, I conjure the Incarnation of MotherFatherGod through the Oyster. The color black is decreation, a way to give form and figure to nothingness. Because apophatic theology holds that God cannot be depicted, any image of divinity is a contradiction. I use image making not to stabilize identity and belief, but to expand the potential of spiritual experience by lifting the self from itself, an act that is itself decreation.

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About Kayla E.

Kayla E. (b. Texas) is an award-winning Mexican American artist working across painting, collage, performance, textiles, sculpture, and sequential art. She received her B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, where she won the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts, and later held a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She has exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Marfa Invitational, and Central Server Works / Marian Cramer Projects in Paris, and is the author of Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics), which won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, MoMA Magazine, The New York Times, The Comics Journal, and Ecotone, among others. A 2026 Creative Capital Awardee, she will debut her first museum solo show at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2029. Kayla works as Creative Director at Fantagraphics and lives in North Carolina with her wife and two dogs.

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For literary inquiries, Kayla is represented by Julie Stevenson at Massie McQuilkin and Altman (julie@mmqalit.com).

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For speaking engagements, keynotes, and appearances, Kayla is represented by Leslie Shipman at The Shipman Agency, Inc. (leslie@theshipmanagency.com).