Meet the Artists

Debra Cartwright is a visual artist whose work navigates the layered terrain of Black womanhood, memory, and the body. A painter working primarily in watercolor and oil, Cartwright constructs hybrid figures that move between abstraction and figuration, conjuring inherited stories, whispered histories, and maternal legacies. Her practice is grounded in deep historical inquiry—particularly around the medical exploitation of Black women in the American South—and rendered through a lush, gestural language that evokes both tenderness and rupture. Her compositions often suggest scars, contractions, and trails of touch—gestures that speak to the intimate ways memory is stored and expressed through the body.

Cartwright’s work engages with the theoretical frameworks of Édouard Glissant, Katherine McKittrick, and Christina Sharpe, drawing on ideas of opacity, demonic grounds, and wake work. These frameworks deepen the conceptual roots of her practice and expand the interpretive space around Black feminine subjectivity. Through nuanced material choices and layered mark-making, she invites viewers to witness what is seen, held, and obscured in stories passed down through generations.

Cartwright holds an MFA from Rutgers University, where she now teaches painting. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in prominent art fairs including Frieze LA and Untitled Art Fair. Across her practice, she treats the figure as a vessel—part reliquary, part archive—through which collective memory, personal narrative, and historical trauma intersect. She currently lives and works between Brooklyn and wherever her practice takes her.