Britni Mara (b. 1991, USA) is a visual artist based in Boulder, CO whose work unfolds through the mediums of movement, ritual, and abstraction. She earned a BFA in Studio Art from Bradley University in 2013 and continued her studies at the Siena Art Institute in Italy. Mara creates paintings and murals that explore the tension between intuitive gestures and deliberate structure to create cohesive, energetic abstract pieces.
Her work has been exhibited widely, including a solo show at Very Serious Gallery (2022) in Chicago; the 4th Annual Midwest Open at Woman Made Gallery (2021), and “Hooking Up: Meet the Collection” at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Glen Ellyn, IL (2022). She was also the founder of a pop-up initiative that supported female and non-binary artists in the Chicagoland area and is passionate about championing women in the art world.
Mara’s paintings are held in both private and institutional collections, and she continues to evolve her studio practice from Colorado.
Statement
The Reckoning considers how systems imprint themselves onto lived experience, and how individuals navigate complacency, resistance, and vulnerability within those structures. Conditions shaped by political instability and cultural fracture are made visible, open to personal interpretation.
Each mark becomes a site where emotion surfaces, none completely ordered or explained. Gestures of resistance are embedded in the process: marks that interrupt, push back, or refuse to be absorbed, suggesting that even within overwhelming systems, acts of disruption and agency remain possible.Color operates as both emotion and atmosphere. Vibrant hues sit beside muted tones, creating tension between urgency and stillness, echoing the dissonance between public discourse and personal experience. Edges and linear frameworks introduce containment that echoes institutional boundaries, holding compositions together while feeling fragile under their own pressure.
Some paintings are completely deconstructed and stitched back together, torn, destroyed, and made whole again, speaking to the beauty that can endure devastation. The work asks for a different kind of looking: not to decode meaning, but to remain present with tension, ambiguity, and contradiction. With sustained attention, a reckoning unfolds, not as resolution, but as recognition. Perhaps witnessing is the beginning of change.