Senia Cade is a New York City-based artist. Cade’s practice incorporates both paintings and ceramics, though she views them as separate endeavors. Cade considers her ceramic practice to be cathartic and experimental, exploring how functional objects can convey stories and hold memories as well as histories within their forms.

Through her paintings, Cade strives to create images that convey dignified, non-sensationalized black beauty–black people as they are, rather than projections of what blackness is assumed to be. Characterized by bold colors and a graphic aesthetic, Cade’s paintings are both a celebration of and a testament to the everyday lives of people from various walks of life. The genesis of her work is often candid snapshots of her subjects, either taken spontaneously by the artist or shared with her by friends and family. Cade’s paintings also function as the medium through which she documents her interactions with others, paying tribute to those who inspire and intrigue her, as well as those she holds dear. Rather than blending paint to achieve smooth transitions between light and shadow, she examines the metaphoric and symbolic underpinnings of representing black skin by abstracting or distorting the skin of her subjects. In turn, she views her portraits as abstract forms that arrive at a figurative painting. Cade considers the textures brought on by abstracting skin to be akin to topography, suggesting that skin color functions as a kind of world or landscape we inhabit–a surface onto which we cast judgments, project meaning, and through which ideologies are formed.