Tijera s. williams
Tijera S. Williams is a multimedia painter, photographer, and design artist born in Long Beach, CA in 1996. As a child, Tijera began as a self-taught artist with dreams of becoming a professional artist as great as her first examples of Matisse, Michelangelo, and Picasso. With great fascinations of the Italian Renaissance throughout the 14th and 16th centuries, a love for vibrant colors, color relations, and an obsession for puzzles and deep thought, this same love motivated Tijera to integrate her personal life into the work that she creates today. Growing up wasn’t an easy feat for her throughout her adolescence, being a victim of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, racial profiling, bullying, and homelessness. Tijera strives to create work that acts as a megaphone of advocacy for victims, inform those who have privilege, and deliver a beautiful yet charged image to represent her cultural significance as a Black woman in America.
Tijera’s artwork focuses on repurposing the viewer's gaze to communicate an avant-garde perspective. By utilizing traditional techniques of painting and drawing, and marrying that with strong color relationships and significance in dominant linear qualities, Tijera revises the male-centered Eurocentric worldview of that of a twenty-first-century Afro-diasporic female gaze as her driving communication. Her images are created and presented in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional deliveries, with photo digital collages and paintings as her predominant presentation. The conversation involving identity is a constant framework instilled within each piece. Her hybridized style corrects the stigmas and stereotypes that isolate the social titles and recognition of what “Black art” and “art” are by colliding the two. Her work has artistic influences from the past such as Michelangelo, and contemporary favorites like Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, Devan Shimoyama, and Renee Cox.
Over the years, Tijera’s work has evolved from admiration from a multitude of works in art history classes into hybridizing this inspiration with personal experiences as a Black woman in America, creating an explicitly personal outreach into the mind of an underrepresented perspective. Tijera’s work is recognized by the awe-striking “high effect” that she utilizes as a way to train and test the viewers to read between the lines, even in front of a gobsmacking display of work. With loads of narrative and historical context embedded within her work, Tijera’s hybrid style art has final goals of being both beautiful and educational about the Black experience, communicating a known message to the people of her similar background, while also educating those who are ignorant to it.
Tijera is a recent graduate of California State University, Long Beach with a Bachelors of Arts degree in Studio Art with concentrations in painting, photography, and graphic design. Tijera currently is published in multiple magazine publications including Voyage LA and Gumbo Magazine based in Chicago, IL.
Tijera currently works in Los Angeles, CA and resides in Huntington Beach, CA.