Photo: Nykelle Devivo
Coralys Carter is a sculptor and weaver living in eastern Tennessee. Recently receiving an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, Carter is furthering her material exploration into the concept of bodies rooted in spaces and places rooted in bodies.
Coralys lends flesh to memory. Through sculpture, etchings, and textiles, Carter contends with the places memories reside: in our objects, in our homes, and in ourselves.
In Carter’s work, a life in southern Illinois and southwest Virginia is returned to by the creation of a slippage in time: memory is refashioned through the materials that make a house (plaster, wood, glass, foam, paper, metal, concrete) and the objects that construct our memories (photographs, hair, letters). Carter considers time as a perpetual point of access within our bodies—inviting others to inhabit her memories with her in the present.
Carter folds time, rendering it as physical as the people that slipped through the Midwest via labor, the Great Migration, and the circumstances that brought her into being.
Recent residencies and honors include the Longenecker Roth Artist in Resident Fellow with Tanya Aguiñiga, the Black Studies Project Fellowship, the Russell Grant, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s SIP Fellowship, Textile Art Center’s WIP Residency, and Processing Foundation’s Processing Fellowship.
Coralys Carter is a multidisciplinary weaver living and working in Southern California. Currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, Carter is furthering her exploration into the concept of bodies rooted in spaces and places rooted in bodies.
Obsessed with locating where memory lives, Coralys layers craft processes such as weaving, printmaking, and sculptural techniques to create vessels for reflection – the works themselves existing between a space of being “done” and coming
Education
2025 MFA University of California, San Diego, CA
2019 Ancient Song Doula Services, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY
2018 BA Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO
Studio Art Major with an Academic focus in Race, Ethnicity, & Migrations Studies
2016 Carleton College, Foumban & Buea, Cameroon
Arts and Culture program in West Africa
Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
2026 upcoming, two person | Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, San Diego, CA
2025 Coal Oil & Sugar | An Interval Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
RATTLEBONE | University of California, San Diego, CA
PLAITED ARCHIVES, two person | Persons Unknown Gallery, Los Angeles CA
2024 if you weight a little while it will all make sense, UCSD Performance Space, San Diego, CA
2023 notes on tension, UCSD Commons Gallery, San Diego, CA
2022 the threaded and the threader, UCSD Main Gallery, San Diego, CA
2020 next life, Dreaming, Flux Factory, Queens, NY
2018 tender headed: a priori forms of intuition, Packard Hall, Colorado Springs, CO
2016 fiber & clay, dual exhibition, Beau, Cameroon
Selected Group Exhibitions
2025 REALLY GOOD SCULPTURE SHOW | Other Places Art Fair, Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA
curated by Harvest & Gather
NextGen | ICA San Diego, San Diego, CA
Trafficking Time | Persons Unknown Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
curated by Leandro Martinez Depietri
(OF) SKIN AND SOIL | University of California, San Diego, CA
brand new | los / nr, La Jolla, CA
I am sending you love from the future | Mandeville Gallery, San Diego, CA
curated by Irene Georgia Tsatsos
GLAMFA 2025 20th Anniversary show | Dennis W. Dutzi Gallery, Long Beach, CA
2024 INLET, OUTLET, Main Gallery, San Diego, CA
2023 Fellows Exhibition, 20|20 Gallery, New York, NY
2017 joan’s day off, 802, Colorado Springs, CO
2016 Sloppy Joans, Weber St, Colorado Springs, CO
2016 Night of Black Arts, Bemis Great Hall, Colorado Springs, CO
Curatorial
2024 a handful of fog, Elliot Hundley Studio, Los Angeles, CA
INLET, OUTLET, Main Gallery, San Diego, CA
Performances
2022 the Threaded and the threader, UCSD Main Gallery, San Diego, CA
2018 Dansix: Emerge, Kathryn Mohrman Theatre, Colorado Springs
2017 Reclaiming Rosas, Cornerstone Arts Center, Colorado Springs
2015 Relations the Play, Taylor Theatre, Colorado Springs
Residencies, Awards and Grants
2024 BSP grant, Black Studies Project UCSD, San Diego CA
2022 Processing Fellowship, Processing Foundation
Work in Progress Residency, Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY (postponed from 2020)
SIP Fellowship, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Manhattan, NY
2021 Laboratory Residency, Spokane Interactive Arts, Tacoma, WA
2020 Pancake House Residency, Pancake House, Minneapolis, MN
Nobody’s Fashion Week, Flux Factory, Queens, NY
FCA Emergency Grant
2018 Venture Grant, Colorado College, Colorado Springs
Resilience and Reclamation in Cameroonian Textile, travel to study cloth as an alternative historical text
2017 Anderson Ranch Study Grant, Aspen, CO
Speaking Engagements
2020 Shedding, a movement workshop, series with Flux Factory, Queens, NY
next life, Dreaming: a conversation at Flux Factory, w/ Brittany J Camacho, Queens, NY
artist talk and open studio, Textile Arts Center, Manhattan, NY
Publications
2021 Nobody’s Fashion Week Exhibition Catalogue
Creatures, bodies issue
2019 Good Trouble: Celebrate the Culture of Resistance | Fast Fashion/Slow Art
2018 terra incognita “a feminist response to the outdoor industry”
Abram, Nia: “Wakanda Forever: Anticolonialism as Sustainable Technology”, terra incognita: A Feminist
Response to the Outdoor Industry
2015 Cipher Magazine
2018 Leviathan
Harlot