Derriann Pharr

My Tears Made a River, 2025
Mixed Media on paper, mounted on wood panel
12 x 16 inches (30.48 x 40.64 cm)

Courtesy of Derriann Pharr

Selected by The Drawing Center

Derriann Pharr (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist who uses an array of media to investigate themes of identity, belonging, memory, and abjection of the human body. Previous and current presentations include solo exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Scott Miller Projects, and a culminating exhibition of work while in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem this year.

Themes of transcendence rest at the heart of Pharr’s practice. She envisions her figures as a mirror: reconciliation with her internal worth and self-compassion are both negotiated each time a figure is born. The beliefs she holds about personhood are heavily informed by a hyper-awareness of her own body as a little girl. Documenting her transition into womanhood has been reliant on a necessary examination and collapse of false beliefs—choosing the act of alchemizing mixed media practices as a mode for mending relationships with self. Her fixation on self-esteem, particularly as it intersects with the lack of intrinsic and physical consideration of marginalized bodies in the American Southern landscape, has shaped a vendetta to broaden the scope of representation within the historical context of figure drawing. Her figures transcend the limitations of naturalistic representation by shapeshifting in a riot of gestural marks, their contours fluid and ambiguous, exempt from the confines of societal scrutiny. Choosing to draw bodies without the natural form in mind allows them to exist away from the constraints placed upon her own.

This found freedom in redefining the human figure invites childlike play and curiosity into creative processes. Building a work begins by constructing the “bones” of the surface; gestural marks—reminiscent of eyes, limbs, genitalia, and therianthropic forms mangle with foliage as a token of balance between human nature and the natural world. The figures shine and rest under protective botanical canopies that bridge our reality and theirs. The work is truly born as color and texture are negotiated through a meditative transformation of pushing unconventional materials against one another to reveal how media can become cohesive, or deconstruct, as they meet. This combination of soft and hard, gritty and smooth, saturated and muted, is reflective of the myriad facets of human existence that work together to shape the human soul.