Artist statement

My practice explores Black interiority through memory, material, and intergenerational storytelling. Working primarily in mixed media, I create layered compositions that move between painting, collage, textiles, and assemblage. Drawing from family archives, genealogical research, and lived experience, I use the personal as a lens through which to consider broader histories within the African Diaspora.

My family's ties to Houston, Galveston, and Southwest Louisiana anchor much of this work. Photographs, documents, oral histories, and inherited objects become points of departure rather than evidence. I am less interested in recovering a complete history than in examining how people carry history within them; through gesture, ritual, adornment, relationships, and acts of care.

Layering functions as both process and metaphor. Images accumulate, dissolve, and re-emerge, mirroring the ways memory is transmitted across generations. Materials such as textiles, paper, wood, and paint reference traditions of resourcefulness and world-building within Black communities while creating physical spaces where multiple histories can exist simultaneously.

While my work often engages historical research, it is ultimately concerned with the richness of everyday Black life. I am interested in moments of rest, intimacy, pleasure, spirituality, humor, and self-determination that exist alongside histories of struggle. Through the construction of these layered worlds, I create spaces where Black life can be encountered in its complexity; not as a singular narrative, but as something expansive, relational, and continually becoming.

Bio

Chayse Sampy is a mixed media, Afro-surrealist artist from Houston, TX. She is currently a Studio Fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. She completed artist residencies at Sanman Studios and Asia Society Texas in 2024, the same year she debuted her first solo show at Sanman Studios. A graduate of Florida State University (MFA, 2023) and Louisiana State University (BFA, 2020), Sampy’s work investigates Black interiority, intergenerational memory, and cultural resilience through painting, collage, and installation. She served as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston and instructor at the Glassell School of Art in 2024. Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally, with recent group exhibitions at the Marianne Boesky (2026), Context Projects (2025), Lawndale Art Center (2025), Texas Biennial (2024), Pen + Brush (2024), the FSU Museum of Fine Arts (2023), the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans (2023), ArtFields (2023), the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (2023), the Ritz Theater and Museum (2023), and Nia Cultural Center (2022).