Serena Viola Corson
Serena Viola Corson is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in San Francisco, California. She was born in 1996 on a beach in North Carolina but moved all around the Southern United States growing up with her single mom due to financial instability and the 2009 recession.
Serena's art manifests strong connections between working-class people and other species trying to survive under the many agonizing forms of modern living. Her paintings do this by intentionally bringing images into being from nothing, like magic. A tradition as old as time. Serena likes to connect to the earliest known artists (creators of Newgrange carvings and the bison painted in Lascaux) by nodding to them in her work and mimicking their symbolism.
Many paintings depict moments of collective joy, platonic love, and radical kinship. The figures Serena paints are always uncensored and are either self-references or inspired by her community. Her focus on intimate friendship spans across mediums, from paintings that feel like a warm group hug to a yearly celebration she hosts called "Manifestations of Love," a pagan alternative to Valentine's Day.
Her playful Matisse-like still lifes double as book recommendations and each one's title is usually a quote from one of the featured books. Her interest in painting still lifes ramped up during the global pandemic when everyone was isolated at home surrounded by their accumulating personal possessions. Each painting thoughtfully curates pairings of books and belongings, evoking a narrative reflective of her personal experience. While Serena's art mainly deals with daunting issues, such as struggling against the entrapments of global patriarchal capitalism, Serena hopes her work will always retain an uplifting sense of freedom, immediacy, and wonder.
