Merges hyperrealism and abstraction, Calida Rawles.

Calida Garcia Rawles (born 1976 in Wilmington, Delaware) is a Los Angeles-based contemporary visual artist. In her large-scale paintings and murals, Rawles merges hyperrealism and abstraction. The artist is interested in questions of identity and race in relation to Western art history. Her portraits often depict representations of water and Black life.

Rawles earned a studio art bachelor's degree in 1998 from Spelman College, Atlanta, where she was exposed to the work of Black women artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Elizabeth Catlett. She holds an MFA in painting from New York University (2000). While attending art school in the American South, Rawles started reflecting on the role of spirituality and belief systems concerning art. In a 2023 interview, she stated “I was not raised in a religious household, but in the South, hearing and talking about God and spirituality was regular, and it was in the culture.” Now “I find that a lot in my work—I am reaching for a larger understanding of life and a connection to something larger than myself.”

In 2004, right after graduating from NYU, the artist relocated from New York to Inglewood, next to Los Angeles, with her with her husband and stepson. After working as a graphic designer little while, she established an art studio in an industrial building. This very city still functions as Rawles's production and experimentation site to this day.

Calida Rawles's figurative paintings of Black women, children, and men submerged in bodies of water that populate the whole canvas space have grown over the years. Her paintings usually depart from photoshoots, gathering up to hundreds of photographs before the artist decides what goes in the painting. Black culture, life, joy, history, and memorialization are major themes in her work.

The artist often inserts her paintings within a larger context of Black America's challenging relationship with water. From segregation in public pools to environmental justice, from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Jim Crow laws.

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