Calida Rawles

Calida Rawles (born 1976, Los Angeles, CA) is an American painter whose work centers Black bodies within aquatic environments to examine race, access, visibility, and belonging. Best known for her hyperrealistic depictions of figures submerged in water, Rawles uses the pool as both a literal and symbolic site—referencing histories of segregation, leisure, vulnerability, and survival. Through luminous surfaces and careful attention to light and reflection, her paintings position water as a space of suspension and possibility, where Black subjects exist outside dominant narratives of trauma and spectacle. Her work reclaims presence, stillness, and interiority as forms of power and resistance.