A Chicago and Milwaukee native, Tyanna Buie received her BA from Western Illinois University, and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Buie is the recipient of multiple awards including the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, Kresge Artist Fellowship/Visual Arts, Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and the 2020 Fellowship.art award, a top accelerator award/program funded through gener8tor, and was recently selected by artist Shepard Fairey to collaborate on the Milwaukee mural titled “Voting Rights is Human Rights.” Her work is included in major institutions, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Northwestern Mutual Tower and Commons in Milwaukee, WI, as well as private collections nationally and has been reviewed on Hyperallergic.com, Newcity Chicago Magazine, South Bend Tribune, and featured on Essay’d.com.

Currently, Buie is an Assistant Professor/Section Chair of Printmaking at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI.

The impermanence experienced due to my upbringing in the foster-care system in Illinois and Wisconsin has led me to create alternative perspectives based upon the research of my family history. Photo-based images, family memorabilia, and documents sourced from family members allow me to re-visit and revive previous impressions from past events. The re-making of images is a direct assertion placed upon the objects and figures to evoke a sense of self-agency. Only then am I able to consider my family’s relationship to myself and one another, as well as the objects and place, in an attempt to re-imagine the future through fragmentation, isolation, and deconstruction.

The use of traditional narrative and non-narrative aspects of storytelling is prevalent throughout my work, which allows me to challenge my family’s past, to re-imagine the future through fragmentation. Consisting of repetition, dissemination, and the building of images, combined with methods such as, painting, drawing, collage, and screen-printing in a non-traditional manner on paper, the pieces exist as singular pieces and large-scale site-specific installations.