Grace Lynne Haynes is a California born visual artist currently based in New Jersey. She creates lusciously composed paintings containing bright textures and patterns. Intricate moments are juxtaposed against flat, black swaths of paint shaped to represent black female bodies. The artist’s painterly devices lead the viewer to question the very nature of color and how historically symbolic meanings surrounding colors and shades, especially black, are constructed. In Haynes’s work, black appears aspirational, dignified, and sublime. The result is a network of images addressing complex topics and stereotypes surrounding black femininity.

Formally, Lynne is a master of color play and conveying textural details. She showcases young women lounging in luxuriously painted patterns against washes of color. Grace portrays tender moments as the hands of her figures rest on swaths of delicately layered areas of patterning and puffy tufts of material that compose of clothing. You can almost feel how soft the textures and patterns are.

Grace Lynne Haynes, an inaugural member of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal residency, is included in the 2020 edition of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art & Style. Haynes has exhibited at the Ontario Museum of History and Art, Untitled Art Miami, Dallas Art Fair and Paul Robeson Gallery of Rutgers University, Newark. She was a selected artist in Daily Collector’s online article “20 Painter’s Who Are Shaping the Next Decade”, and her work has been published in CNN Art & Style, LA Weekly, New American Paintings, Culture Type and on the cover of The New Yorker.