Join us for the opening reception of What Carries Us, a solo exhibition featuring new works by local artist Nia Simone. Celebrate with us on Saturday, June 14, 2025 from 6pm to 10pm. The reception is free and open to the public. We look forward to seeing you here!
Stay Studio is operated by Stay Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Upon RSVP, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our youth arts education programs and to continue offering free art exhibitions for the community.
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Nia Simone (b. 2001) is a visual artist and educator whose work centers the emotional, cultural, and psychological interiors of African American life. Raised between Compton, Columbus, and New Jersey, Simone’s practice is shaped by a transitory upbringing marked by both belonging and observation. Working across oil, acrylic, pen, and colored pencil, she creates layered compositions that bridge personal memory with collective inheritance.
Her imagery spans surrealist self-portraits, domestic abstractions, and text-based drawings that incorporate diaristic writing, sociological references, and cultural memory. Grounded in African American narratives, Simone’s work resists reductive binaries, offering a visual language of contradiction, softness, and truth.
She has exhibited in professionally curated and student-led spaces at the University of California, Irvine, including the University Art Gallery and Catalyst Gallery, as well as institutions such as Stay Studio, Rancho Los Cerritos, Art Share L.A., and the Compton Art & History Museum. In addition to her studio practice, Simone facilitates workshops and community dialogues that explore art as a tool for healing and self-definition. She will complete her BA in Art at UC Irvine in June 2025 and begin teaching in Los Angeles through Teach For America. During the summer, she will also serve as a substitute after-school teaching artist with Stay Studio.
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What Carries Us explores the emotional and cultural inheritances embedded in African American life. Through a body of work that includes surrealist self-portraits, abstracted acrylic scenes, and drawings layered with diaristic text, the exhibition examines how memory, care, and survival shape identity, particularly within communities often overlooked or stereotyped.
Drawing from familial moments and everyday rituals, the artist transforms scenes of adolescence, community, and solitude into meditations on grief, softness, and resilience. Textures, symbols, and fragmented environments create a sense of emotional depth, while the presence of figures that are drawn from loved ones or the artist herself anchors the work in lived experience.
Though rooted in the specific histories of African American communities, the exhibition speaks to broader inner-city and working-class realities, offering points of resonance across cultural lines. It affirms the full humanity of people too often flattened by narratives of triumph or tragedy alone.
What Carries Us resists spectacle in favor of intimacy. It asks what we inherit, what we carry forward, and what it costs to be seen in our wholeness. In doing so, it offers no answers but space… space to reflect, feel, and imagine otherwise.