About Alexis Tyson
Art for every wall, person and moment.
Driven by passion
I grew up surrounded by art. Listening to every kind of music, traveling across the country, studying the humanities, and always creating. My dad would drive me around Baltimore, and we would look at murals, talk about the city, and notice the things that made one neighborhood feel different from another. At the time, I did not know I was learning about public history or placemaking. I only knew that there was something alive about seeing a person's imagination take up physical space.
That stayed with me.
My first creative language was performance. I studied acting throughout middle school and attended Baltimore School for the Arts, where I began to understand expression through voice, movement, character, and story. Eventually, I became more interested in creating the story than simply inhabiting it. Writing, painting, curating, and research became ways of doing that.
I began painting at the end of high school. At first, it was a coping mechanism. I was trying to make sense of a difficult relationship and the feelings of abandonment that came with it. I did not necessarily know what I was trying to say when I started painting. I only knew that something needed somewhere to go.
Over time, I realized that art had given me something I had been searching for long before I knew how to name it: a way to decipher myself.
I think often about an experience I had as a young person in therapy. After trying several therapists and repeatedly feeling as though I was being asked to explain things I did not yet have the language for, I met someone who handed me a ball of clay. We talked while I shaped it in my hands. At the end of the session, she asked me about the person I had made and why I had formed him the way I did.
Suddenly, I was answering questions I had been trying to answer for weeks.
I left that session feeling as though something had shifted, even though we had not approached the things I thought we were supposed to be talking about. I understood, perhaps for the first time, that making something could become another way of speaking. Sometimes the image arrives before the sentence. Sometimes the body understands before the mind catches up.
My primary medium is acrylic paint, but my practice has never been limited to one material. I move between painting, murals, writing, design, exhibitions, performance, research, and documentation because I am less interested in staying within a medium than I am in following a question wherever it leads.
My paintings are not really attempts to represent life as it looks. I am more interested in what life feels like. I think of them as physical manifestations of sensations that are difficult to hold onto: memory, intimacy, tension, joy, uncertainty, longing, recognition.
I work intuitively, mapping color, movement, and form across the canvas until the painting begins to reveal its own logic. I want the viewer to ask, What am I looking at? but I am even more interested in what comes after that question:
What does this mean for me?
At The Peale, MAXgallery, Love Groove Festival, Poppleton Now Community Association, the Independent Dialysis Foundation, and through independent projects, I have found myself continually returning to the same question: how do we create places where people can see themselves as part of the story?
My research practice has become particularly interested in artists themselves. I want to continuously interview Baltimore creatives and build an evolving archive of their stories. I want to know not only what they make, but what shaped them, what they remember, what they believe their work is doing, and what it means to make something in this city.
My roles as an artist, curator, researcher, and writer may look different from one another, but I do not experience them as separate identities. They are different ways of paying attention.
As an artist, I am interested in individual experience and the interior worlds we carry.
As a curator, I think about how those individual worlds can meet.
As a researcher, I document what might otherwise disappear.
As a writer, I try to make those ideas accessible enough to enter into conversation.
Across all of them, I am interested in connection.
I want to make exhibitions that invite larger conversations within the neighborhoods where they exist. I want to support artists in developing their ideas rather than simply placing their work on a wall. I want to write about Baltimore's creative communities in ways that feel accessible, thoughtful, and alive. I want to continue building archives that understand cultural history as something lived, not simply recorded after the fact.
And I want to keep developing my own art until it can say something I have not yet found another way to say.