Chris Watts

Chris Watts (born 1984, in High Point, North Carolina) is an American artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores social and personal narrative, abstraction, embodiment, and the unstable boundary between the visible and the immaterial. Working across painting, installation, drawing, video, and mixed media, Watts examines perception, disappearance, and sacred or meditative space through layered surfaces, translucent materials, and spatial compositions that function like windows into overlapping psychic and symbolic worlds.  Watts studied at the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław, Poland, before attending the MFA program at Yale School of Art. His work often engages abstraction, Black embodiment, spirituality, and social history, using painting on soft and sheer textiles, resin, acrylic, silk, and installation to consider visibility, disappearance, and the ways Blackness is imagined or misrecognized within dominant visual culture. More recent work has also drawn from video footage of police violence, removing the figure to emphasize absence and to challenge prescribed modes of representation.  His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Galerie Lelong, Welancora Gallery, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, and other venues in the United States and abroad. He participated in the Art & Law Fellowship Program at Cornell University and was a 2022–2023 Soros Justice Fellow. Chris Watts lives and works in New York and North Carolina.