CONTEMPORARY ART IN CONTEXT

MAYA FREELON  CONTEMPORARY ARTIST AND EDUCATOR

Freelon’s awe-inspiring stained tissue paper artworks are replete with examples of the elements of art (shape and form, color, space, and texture) and the principles of design (unity, contrast, and pattern). She has worked with tissue paper since 2005, when she had an epiphany about the medium. While living with her grandmother in Cambridge and earning her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she found a stack of tissue paper stained by a leaking water pipe. The stains formed all sorts of patterns and colors. The experience changed the direction of her art practice. Her first exhibition was of Tissue Quilts in Boston.

For Freelon, tissue paper represents discovery, transformation, and healing. She has experimented with it in numerous ways, patenting several of the processes. One of her processes, Tissue Ink Monoprints, uses several inks on multiple layers of paper. She also creates Tissue Spirals sculptures composed of thousands of tiny scraps of dyed tissue paper in tightly wound spirals. One of her extraordinary processes is her Tissue Ink/Mono/Photo Prints, which incorporate the potter’s wheel, creating a visible vortex, as seen in Shy/Shine (2024).

Freelon’s godmother and namesake, poet Maya Angelou (1928–2014), described her tissue paper artworks as metaphors of the human condition: delicate yet resilient. Tissue paper is non-toxic and easy to use and recycle. When she creates Tissue Quilts or Tissue Sculptures, she often collaborates with community members, in the spirit of traditional African American quilting bees. Freelon perceives her tissue paper art as a tribute to her grandmother, and the African American communityʼs history of never letting any available material resource go to waste. She states that improvisation and discovery are a big part of her creative process. Her method of bleeding inks on tissue paper creates incredible combinations of colors, shapes, and patterns, seen in Untitled (2006).

Paper has rarely attained the stunning results of Freelon’s installations of stained tissue paper—particularly works such as Greater Than Or Equal To (2020). But other artists have used a variety of types of paper in very imaginative ways. Georges Braque (1882–1963, France), one of the founders of Cubism, initiated paper collage (called papier collé, or pasted paper, in 1912) with his use of faux-textured wallpaper combined with cut-out pieces of printed paper. Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, US) created relief-like works composed of hundreds of cut-out and painted bits of paper that produced fascinating textured surfaces. Kim Hyung-joo (b. 1959, South Korea) is renowned for her sculpted and painted paper reliefs that depict the traditional Korean women’s garment known as the chogori. Vietnamese artist Tam van Tran’s (b. 1966) reliefs made of paper projecting from the two-dimensional surface are brilliantly colored with unusual natural pigments such as spirulina, although his use of color differs from Freelon’s virtual rainbow of stained tissue paper.

Born in Houston, Texas, Freelon was raised in an artistic family. Her father was an architect of several museums and cultural centers, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her mother is an internationally known jazz singer and composer. Her great-grandfather was an Impressionist painter who was renowned during the Harlem Renaissance. Her grandmother was a schoolteacher, community leader, and beautician who taught Freelon quilting when she was young.

Freelon attended the Durham (North Carolina) School of the Arts, where she was recognized as an accomplished colorist. After two years there, she graduated from the Williston Northampton High School in Easthampton, Massachusetts. She went on to receive a BA (2005) from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and an MFA (2007) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Freelon has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She has had artist residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, Queenspace in New York, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Art on the Vine Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and Korobitey Institute in Ghana. From October 29, 2026, to May 29, 2027, she will have an immersive exhibition titled Grounded at the Gregg Museum at the University of North Carolina, Raleigh. It is one of a group of four exhibitions at the Gregg Museum exploring wellness and Black Southern heritage through photography, digital art, and generational storytelling.

What are some of the biggest influences on your work, including other artists, events, or experiences outside the arts?
MF: Finding the stack of tissue paper in my grandmother’s basement had a major impact on my artwork over the past twenty years. Water has been especially significant. I began working with tissue paper in 2005, the same year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and displaced so many Black people. That connection between water, vulnerability, destruction, and renewal continues to resonate in my work. I come from a lineage of artists and makers, including my father, architect Phil Freelon, and my great-grandfather, painter Allan Randall Freelon Sr. I’m deeply inspired by artists such as Betye Saar, El Anatsui, Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, Beverly McIver, and Howardena Pindell—Black artists who use material, color, texture, abstraction, and repetition to share complex histories.

What is a typical workday like for you?
MF: There really isn’t a typical day. That would be quite boring to me! I’m a mom, so much of my creative practice is shaped around my kids’ schedule, and I recently became a licensed massage therapist, which is a new way to work with my hands. So my practice moves between my studio, exhibition planning and meetings, community engagement, grant writing, and massage therapy and wellness.

In the studio, some days are physically demanding, especially when I’m building large-scale installations. Other days are quieter and more reflective—researching, writing, sketching, meditating, or simply sitting with the materials until they reveal what they want to become. I’ve learned to value both the visible labor and the periods of rest that make the work possible.

Bodywork for me is a way to give back to those who care for others more than themselves.

Do you have specific strategies, rituals, or routines that help you work or generate ideas?
MF: Reiki is a way I center and ground myself daily; it’s a connection to the universal life energy. I usually light a candle or incense on my altar to set an intention, and then send good energy to myself, family, friends, and those in need. If I ever feel stuck, repeating these steps usually helps move me in the right direction.

The coloration and shapes in your installations are extraordinary. Are there particular African textile traditions, artistic movements, or cultural influences that inform your work?
MF: African and African diasporic textile traditions deeply inform how I think about color, pattern, layering, improvisation, and collective memory. I’m inspired by the visual rhythms of kente cloth, adinkra symbols, strip weaving, batik, and African-American quiltmaking traditions. “We know how to make ʻsomething out of nothingʼ and ʻa way out of no wayʼ” are two things my grandmother would repeat to me often as a little girl.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself as an emerging artist? What advice would you offer young aspiring artists today?
MF: I would tell my younger self to trust her instincts sooner and not wait for permission. The qualities that may initially seem impractical, strange, or too fragile can become the foundation of a new artistic language. I would also remind myself that rest is not the opposite of ambition. A sustainable practice requires care for the body, spirit, family, and community.

To young artists, I would say: remain curious, experiment freely, document your work, and learn the practical side of being an artist. Build genuine relationships instead of only looking for opportunities. Study the history that wasn’t written in books. Do not allow the existing canon to limit your imagination. Define success for yourself, and make your own currency. Only you can determine your worth.

You currently have a 2026–2027 artist residency that is part retrospective and part immersive, site-specific installation, opening October 29. Can you tell us more about that? Working with North Carolina State educators, how did you bring your experience as an educator to the process?
MF: My 2026–2027 residency at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design brings together work from the last 20+ years, a new site-specific installation, and immersive experiences centered on memory, legacy, movement, and transformation. It is especially meaningful because my father, architect Phil Freelon, helped shape the renovated Gregg Museum.

Visitors will be invited to slow down, move through the work, notice how light and air affect the tissue paper, and consider their own relationships to memory and history. The residency also creates opportunities for conversation, movement, meditation, performance, and collaborative learning throughout the NC State community.

My experience as an educator shaped the project from the beginning. Working with museum staff, NC State faculty, students, and other educators, I approached Grounded as both an art exhibition and a place to teach and learn. I want educators to have multiple entry points into the work—from material experimentation and visual analysis to discussions of family history, epigenetics, architecture, grief, and care. The residency will also include a hands-on tissue quilt workshop, inviting participants to explore color, layering, memory, and transformation while creating their own collaborative tissue paper artwork.

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Written by Karl Cole, Art Historian and Curator of Images at Davis Publications. kcole@davisart.com