Lelia Byron’s community inspired exhibit highlights diversity in the world

Narrating through multiple figures on one canvas, Lelia uses thick oil paint and bright colours, to create powerful and compelling paintings.

Travelling to new and distant locations, Lelia aims to find intriguing stories, which demonstrate the diversity of the world.

Her latest exhibition As I Listened to the Sounds of an Upstream Current, is a series of paintings made about a community of factory workers in RI and MA, whose individuals are originally from Central America.

Creating depictions of different community members such as human rights activists, mothers, fish factory workers, and traditional textile artists, Lelia’s diverse stories evoke emotion and intrigue with every brushstroke.

Hoping to make their individual stories visible to different cultures, Lelia explores questions relating to how we are all connected as a community and the universality of human dreams. Incorporating times of violence alongside joyous occasions, describing their jobs, their ambitions, and their lives, her latest exhibition hopes to bring the audience closer to the outside world, than ever before.

The exhibition takes place from 21 August - 24 September 2017 at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University.