Khalilah Birdsong (b. 1977, Cleveland, Ohio; raised in Atlanta, Georgia) is a visual artist known for her large-scale abstract paintings. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree, with Honors, from Goldsmiths, University of London (England).
Birdsong’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the United States and internationally, including Atlanta, New York, Cincinnati, Hamburg, London, and Mallorca. Her solo and group exhibitions span the U.S., Japan, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections worldwide, including commissioned works and a piece in the private collection of President Barack Obama. She has also completed site-specific sculptural installations for corporate clients in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tokyo, Japan. In 2025, one of Birdsong’s paintings was acquired by the Kenkeleba House Museum (New York, New York).
Rooted in abstraction, Birdsong’s practice explores memory, interiority, survival, and resurgence. Her process-led approach is marked by improvisation, spontaneity, and intuition. She layers and strips away paint to create richly textured surfaces. Contusions, ridges, and moments of rawness expose forgotten layers beneath. This tactile language is an invitation for viewers to engage emotionally and instinctively with the work.
Birdsong’s recent seven-year nomadic journey around the world deeply informed her creative process, instilling a disciplined and transformative perspective that continues to shape her artistic vision.
Her paintings evoke the scale and physical presence found in the work of Jack Whitten, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Ed Clark, and the later abstractions of Gerhard Richter. Like these artists, Birdsong achieves a compelling balance between physicality and precision.
In 2019, Contemporary Art Curator (London) named her among “100 Future Contemporary Artists.” That same year, she was invited to exhibit four large-scale paintings and a sculptural installation at the XII Florence Biennale in Florence, Italy. In 2020, she received a Hambidge Fellowship for the Creative Arts & Sciences. Birdsong currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.
Statement
My work explores memory, interiority, and the ways they can be fragmented and rebuilt. My paintings treat memory as landscape: shifting environments that feel both familiar and elusive, where presence and place are in constant transition.
Working in acrylic and oil, my process is guided by intuition, improvisation, and close observation. I build and disrupt in equal measure, layering color and then removing it to reveal traces of what came before. This cyclical approach yields textured surfaces marked by ridges, subtle abrasions, and exposed layers where forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure over time.
A seven-year nomadic journey has deeply shaped my practice, informing how I understand place as something lived, remembered, and continually redefined. That experience surfaces in the work through a sense of movement, layering, and transformation.
Ultimately my paintings invite contemplative engagement, reflecting how memory is formed, obscured, and recalled. They offer spaces that echo internal landscapes where perception, experience, and recollection converge and unfold.