Patricia Renee' Thomas
Patricia Renee' Thomas is a Philadelphia-based painter, drawer, and art educator, with a BFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and a current 2021 MFA candidate at University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design. Thomas has recently shown at Kravets-Wehby Gallery in Chelsea, New York and Kapp Kapp Gallery in Philadelphia in 2020. She is recently a 2021 recipient of the Meyer Family Award for Contemporary Art in collaboration with The Colored Girls Museum and Main Line Arts Center.
Through figure and portrait painting/drawing, Patricia looks to remedy lived and inherited experiences of colorism, racism and misogyny, calling back to her Black girlhood to rewrite memory and create the opportunity for reflection and rest. Her work has been manifesting new places from old places, manipulating socialized racial rules that even creep into the spaces we so injudiciously deem racially neutral. Memory is peeled down and rebuilt as a place in which she can frequent the woods without fear, where she can walk into a store without being followed, where she can dare lay in any space, where nature and her body are not policed, colonized, raped, shot, or poisoned and immersion into a femme safe haven is encouraged.
Through figure and portrait painting/drawing, Patricia looks to remedy lived and inherited experiences of colorism, racism and misogyny, calling back to her Black girlhood to rewrite memory and create the opportunity for reflection and rest. Her work has been manifesting new places from old places, manipulating socialized racial rules that even creep into the spaces we so injudiciously deem racially neutral. Memory is peeled down and rebuilt as a place in which she can frequent the woods without fear, where she can walk into a store without being followed, where she can dare lay in any space, where nature and her body are not policed, colonized, raped, shot, or poisoned and immersion into a femme safe haven is encouraged.
