Phyllis Viola Boyd

Phyllis Viola Boyd is a Black interdisciplinary artist and urban strategist exploring connectedness and healing from the scale of the individual to that of the community. Whether her medium is painting, music, youth development, or community planning and design, she is continually asking herself, “How do we continue to create and sustain healing systems of belonging and interconnectedness in the midst of systems that were designed to diminish and extinguish us?"

She has been exploring this question through paintings that are meditations on what it means to be expansive and human and to live in awareness of the interconnectedness of us with our ancestors and future descendants, of all beings with the world around us, and of the never-ending flow of energy and matter. Her intuitive process of painting is part of my practice to intentionally shift from hustle and resistance (constant busy-ness in response to external demands and manufactured desires) to flow (intuitive action/inaction in response to my internal compass, expansive awareness, and love).