Khalilah Birdsong

'Under the Aspen Tree' - colorful abstract painting, layered, impasto, yellow

2025

Khalilah Birdsong (b. 1977, Cleveland, Ohio; raised in Atlanta, Georgia) is a visual artist known for her large-scale abstract paintings. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. Khalilah’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the United States and internationally, including Atlanta, New York, Cincinnati, Hamburg, London, and Mallorca. Her solo and group exhibitions span the U.S., Japan, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections worldwide, including commissioned works and a piece in the private collection of President Barack Obama. She has also completed site-specific sculptural installations for corporate clients in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tokyo, Japan. In 2025, one of Khalilah’s paintings was acquired by the Kenkeleba House Museum (New York, New York). Rooted in abstraction, Khalilah’s practice explores themes of survival and resurgence. Her process-led approach is marked by improvisation, spontaneity, and intuition. She layers and strips away paint to create richly textured surfaces—contusions, ridges, and moments of rawness that expose forgotten layers beneath. This tactile language is an invitation for viewers to engage emotionally and instinctively with the work. Khalilah’s recent seven-year nomadic journey around the world deeply informed her creative process, instilling a disciplined and transformative perspective that continues to shape her artistic vision. Her paintings evoke the scale and physical presence found in the work of Jack Whitten, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Ed Clark, and the later abstractions of Gerhard Richter. Like these artists, Khalilah achieves a compelling balance between physicality and precision. In 2019, Contemporary Art Curator (London) named her among “100 Future Contemporary Artists.” That same year, she was invited to exhibit four large-scale paintings and a sculptural installation at the XII Florence Biennale. In 2020, she received a Hambidge Fellowship for the Creative Arts & Sciences. Khalilah currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.