Artists of the Current

Christopher Paul Jordan

Born in Tacoma WA (1990), Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist who investigates the afterlife of memory, simulating conditions of removal to reexamine human relationships. Lacing salvaged textiles such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan separates his paintings from their original surfaces while generating new histories from the traces they leave behind. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his inquiries are often enacted or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In the Interim – Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan is a Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow, A Queer|Art Fellow, and holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023). 

Kristina Batiste

Kristina Batiste is a minimalist potter and ceramic artist. Prior to ceramics she worked as a writer and editor, in graphic design, and higher education, and is currently a part-time librarian. The through line of her career has been a focus on distilling information into simple, memorable forms and ruthless editing. Age, gender, and experience inform her practice, and inspirations include modernist art and architecture, literature, and nature. She loves a line, and will someday pick a favorite between porcelain, red, brown, buff, and black clay. 

Batiste has been featured in “Black American Ceramic Artists” published by Schiffer, an article in Ceramics Monthly, and was the subject of a segment in Hulu’s “Your Attention Please” documentary series. She is also the co-founder of the Tacoma Pottery Salon, a mostly monthly gathering of potters. 

Darrell McKinney

Darrell McKinney is a Tacoma-based interdisciplinary artist. His practice explores the intersections across design, art, and architecture. The work speaks to how design can be utilized to explore the complexities of politics, race, and social infrastructure through the interconnectedness of history, people, and places. He received a Master of Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been featured in exhibitions at EXPO (Chicago) and internationally at Salone Del Mobile (Milan), Spazio Rossana Orlandi (Milan), and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was the recipient of fellowships and awards such as the Greg Kucera & Larry Yocom Fellowship Award (2022), A Tale of Today Emerging Artist Fellowship for the Richard H. Driehaus Museum (2019), Hilltop Lasting Legacy Fellowship (2020), and the Design Council Award (2018).  

Currently, McKinney’s work spans spatial design, object design, and social practice. He continues to explore the built environment and the objects that populate it, exploring issues varying in scale: a community, a building, housewares, and people.  

Aisha Harrison

Aisha is a studio and public artist working primarily in clay and bronze. They discovered clay in a community studio, while working toward a degree in Spanish at Grinnell College in Iowa. After graduating, she spent the next two years teaching third and fourth grades in Atlanta, Georgia, and exploring clay at Callenwolde Fine Arts Center in Georgia, and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Aisha decided to go back to school and received a BFA from Washington State University, and an MFA from University of Nebraska- Lincoln. Aisha uses the body as a site to explore the lived experiences of racism, ancestral (human and non-human) connection, and, as a mixed-race Black person, the complicated blend of histories held within their body. Their work shows reverence for real bodies while also incorporating elements that are physical manifestations of the intangible. The humans they make are often interconnected with elements of the natural world, many of whom are native to the Pacific Northwest where Aisha’s family has lived for four generations. Aisha’s work attempts to balance the individual and the collective, where each piece contains a unique individual but also references a larger collective of people and/or our relatives from nature.  

Aisha’s studio work is shown nationally with recent work at Pottery Northwest, The Whatcom Museum, The Bascom: Center for the Visual Arts, Crocker Art Museum, Northern Clay Center, Wa Na Wari, Bainbridge Museum of Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum at WSU, and at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at South Sound Community College. Aisha has done residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Baltimore Clayworks. They have taught workshops/courses/programs at Pottery Northwest, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, The Evergreen State College, Bykota Senior Center, Baltimore Clayworks, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, and the Lux Center for the Arts.  

Paige Pettibon

Paige Pettibon is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tacoma, Washington. She works with a range of mediums, including acrylics, oils, watercolor, fiber art, jewelry, and digital design, to create pieces that reflect both personal identity and collective experience. As a Black, White, and Salish (from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) artist, Paige draws deeply from her multicultural heritage.   

Her work serves as a bridge between communities, offering a space for reflection and dialogue. Through her art, she explores themes of identity, cultural connection, and shared humanity, fostering allyship and understanding through compassionate storytelling and imagery. Her work has been featured at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Smithsonian, and various galleries in the Puget Sound region. Additionally, her jewelry line, Plain to Sea, has garnered national support from collectors who are drawn to her ability to merge cultural expression with fine craftsmanship.  

Le’Ecia Farmer

Le’Ecia Farmer is a queer Black parent and creative. She has studied fiber art, visual art, apparel design, and mixed media. She continually draws inspiration from the overt and covert connections between her cultural upbringing and art practice. Le’Ecia likes to play with the various meanings that materials possess and views every medium as an opportunity to explore, experiment, or disrupt. Le’Ecia often engages with themes of diasporic longing and loss. She is drawn to materials like cotton, wool, raffia, fabric and natural dye and treats these materials as living and vibrating things. They carry our stories, as we do them. 

Kellie Richardson

Kellie Richardson is an artist and educator born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. Kellie’s work primarily explores themes of love, loss and longing, with particular attention to how those themes intersect with Black American humanity. Kellie’s relationship with art is defined by the metamorphosis that happens when art is a liberatory practice. She is a teaching artist who has worked and performed at universities, museums, jails, and alleys. As Tacoma’s Poet Laureate from 2017-2019, Kellie leveraged her role to experiment with form, incorporating collage and interactive performance into her poetry. She created and curated three Tacoma Summer SOULstice Festivals, an event centering LGBTQ and BIPOC artists. Each of Kellie’s projects are another re-invention and re-imagining of form and technique. Her call as an artist and educator is to showcase the beauty and power of everyday folk and put some funk into the dread we call survival. 

Kenya Shakoor

Kenya Shakoor is a Tacoma native. She began her photographic journey by utilizing YouTube videos to teach herself the elements of photography. Since picking up her camera, she has used her lens to capture Black subjects imaginatively.