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Calida Rawles
1975
BirthplaceWilmington, Delaware, United Staes of America
Biography
Calida Rawles was born in 1976 in Wilmington, Delaware, into a working-class family; her mother and father worked for the US Postal Service and Amtrak, respectively. Rawles drew as a child, taking commissions from her friends for personalized cartoons, which she would sell to them for a quarter. As a youth she found inspiration both in the visual arts and in literature; written stories and narratives exerted such a great impact on her that her opting to study art instead of English in college, as she described it, involved “a slow process of elimination.” Rawles graduated from Spelman College in 1998 with a degree in painting. She received her Master of Fine Arts, also focused on painting, from New York University in 2000.
After graduation, Rawles worked as a graphic designer, illustrator, and author. She continued to paint, selling works out of her Los Angeles studio. Around 2013, Rawles learned how to swim, an activity that her parents and grandparents either did not learn or did not engage in, due to the history in the US of segregationist laws that barred Black Americans from public pools and beaches. A voracious reader, Rawles also went further back into history, reading about the Middle Passage, the transatlantic route that carried enslaved people from Africa to the Western Hemisphere, and water memory theory—the idea that as a body of water flows, it carries traces of anything that was placed into it. These histories and firsthand experiences with water influenced the series of paintings for which Rawles is best known, showing figures underwater dressed in white. Thy Name We Praise (2023) is intended to be the last work in this series.
After graduation, Rawles worked as a graphic designer, illustrator, and author. She continued to paint, selling works out of her Los Angeles studio. Around 2013, Rawles learned how to swim, an activity that her parents and grandparents either did not learn or did not engage in, due to the history in the US of segregationist laws that barred Black Americans from public pools and beaches. A voracious reader, Rawles also went further back into history, reading about the Middle Passage, the transatlantic route that carried enslaved people from Africa to the Western Hemisphere, and water memory theory—the idea that as a body of water flows, it carries traces of anything that was placed into it. These histories and firsthand experiences with water influenced the series of paintings for which Rawles is best known, showing figures underwater dressed in white. Thy Name We Praise (2023) is intended to be the last work in this series.