About the Artist

Maiya Joy Bryant (Maiya Mulan) is a contemporary painter whose work explores identity, emotional inheritance, and the tension between freedom as an ideal and freedom as a lived experience. Working across acrylic, oil, and mixed media, she merges portraiture, abstraction, and symbolic imagery to translate personal and cultural narratives into visually charged compositions rooted in presence, intimacy, and self-definition.

Her earlier work centered explicitly on feminine sensuality and liberation—bodies rendered boldly, emotion worn openly, and desire positioned as power. These paintings were unapologetic and confrontational. While her current work carries the same core spirit, its language has evolved. Sensuality and freedom now exist less as literal imagery and more through gesture, line weight, texture, and the movement of color across the surface. The work speaks more quietly, but with greater complexity, asking the viewer to slow down, lean in, and feel.

Once working primarily in acrylic, Maiya now incorporates oil and experimental processes into her practice, a shift shaped by her formal education and expanding technical vocabulary. This transition has allowed for greater depth, temporal layering, and material sensitivity. As her practice continues to evolve, she is actively expanding into oil painting, mixed media, and printmaking.

Maiya frequently reclaims historical and contemporary visual traditions through a Black American lens, placing Black women at the center of narratives from which they have long been excluded. By referencing classical portraiture, everyday objects, and symbolic forms, she collapses time—allowing past and present to coexist on the canvas. In doing so, she interrogates visibility, memory, and the right to occupy space with dignity and agency.

Emotion functions not as an afterthought, but as structure. Grief, longing, joy, softness, betrayal, and resilience operate as compositional forces within her work. Through expressive color and intentional mark-making, Maiya constructs psychological landscapes where internal states become visible. The canvas becomes a site of negotiation between vulnerability and control, tenderness and resistance.

Maiya is currently pursuing an Associate Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting and plans to continue her education through an MFA in Studio Art. Her long-term goal is to teach at the collegiate level, integrating studio practice with principles of art education and art therapy. She views education and community engagement as essential extensions of her artistic life—spaces where art becomes a tool for emotional access, healing, and collective reflection.

Ultimately, Maiya’s work is about becoming. It documents the shifting language of womanhood, Blackness, intimacy, and freedom as lived in real time. Each painting functions as both record and question—asking what it means to exist fully, visibly, and truthfully in the world.

Freelance. NY based.

“Art has consumed my life, and my meaning of it in just a few years. I see art in everything from the way we dance to how we write our grocery list. To live, is an art. And my goal is to show people the art in existing.

It took me a while to find what I loved to paint, and once I did.. I realized it was all I ever knew.

I want every women no matter color, shape or size to see my work, and see a reflection of themselves. I want my art to show them the beauty in what they never may have or haven’t deemed beautiful and exploit it, positively. As long as my work sparks an ounce of self love, courage and empowerment, I’m doing my job. “

-Maiya Mulan