LAKESHA LEE

LaKesha Lee is a multidisciplinary artist based in Knoxville, TN. An MFA graduate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she earned her BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2019. She is the 2025-2027 Faculty Fellow at Belmont University’s Watkins College of Art. Her work celebrates Black representation and family legacy, especially that of her maternal connections, offering visual narratives that honor the past while inspiring a shared future.

She weaves family photos into her work, cultivating a “material-language” that bears the patina of history. The act of making—cutting, layering, searching, mixing, boiling, stitching, firing—becomes a process of repair and reclamation, an homage to resilience within the African American experience and connection across generations.

Family, in all its complexities, is the heart of her creative practice. Each piece serves as an archive of intimate stories evoking the textures of lived experiences. Inspired by a quilt, the last gift from her grandmother before her passing, Lee’s material is a living legacy. She salvages cloth from the Knoxville area, her family, and the remnants of past projects to piece together a tapestry of memory. In crafting these visual narratives, she seeks to not only preserve her family’s legacy but also offer a space where viewers can connect to their own histories and imagine new futures.

Lee’s practice is rooted in material exploration, where accessible and natural materials become a language of freedom and cultural preservation. Her materials are literally infused with the land, using walnut ink, marigold, and pokeberry. The textiles become vessels infused with the tension between what is preserved and what is lost.

Lee has participated in several notable exhibitions, including Embodying Culture: Women in Appalachia at the Reese Museum, ST of ART UAB at the Gadsden Museum of Art, and the 77th Annual Student Competition at the Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture at the University of Tennessee. Prior to joining Watkins, Lee served as a curator at The Bottom and the Frieson Gallery in Knoxville, TN.