About Afrocentric Keyy
Born and raised in Southern California, Afrocentric Keyy’s artistic foundation began in a performing arts high school specializing in visual arts and deepened through formal training, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Arts in 2013. During her academic journey, she began questioning the absence of representation—asking where the images were of people who looked like her family, her community, and herself. That inquiry became the catalyst for her practice.
Afrocentric Keyy is a Brooklyn-based Black Queer visual artist working in oil on reclaimed wood, merging classical painting techniques with environmental consciousness. Each wood panel she selects carries a prior life—weathered, discarded, overlooked. By transforming these materials into portraiture, she turns remnants into reverence, constructing narratives rooted in renewal, resilience, and reclamation. The grain of the wood becomes metaphor: DNA, lineage, migration, inherited memory.
She defines her style as Contemporary Afro-Realism Portraiture—an exploration of identity through bold, saturated color and layered symbolism. Inspired by thermal imaging and the unseen spectrum beneath the skin, her palette exaggerates undertones—deep crimsons, emerald shadows, electric blues, radiant golds—revealing emotional temperature as much as physical form. Through this visual language, she centers Black figures in states of divinity, introspection, and power.
Her work celebrates the African, African American, and Caribbean diaspora while challenging traditional narratives around beauty, visibility, and worth. Each painting invites reflection and dialogue, creating space for viewers to see themselves not as marginal subjects, but as central protagonists within cultural history.
Now based in New York City, Afrocentric Keyy’s work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, including Australia, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Spain, and Tokyo. These global experiences continue to inform her commitment to representation, sustainability, and the expansion of Black presence within contemporary art spaces.
Afrocentric Keyy is more than a name—it is a declaration. Through reclaimed materials, luminous oil pigment, and intentional storytelling, she builds a living archive of resilience, identity, and transformation.