Artist Statement
Drawing from abstraction, floral iconography, and urban visual language, my work celebrates resilience, memory, and transformation. Through a synthesis of graffiti, calligraphy, and layered textures, I create vivid compositions that echo emotional depth and material experimentation. Across each series, I seek to create a layered experience—inviting viewers to move between rhythm and stillness, gesture and meaning, surface and depth. My practice honors both the individual and the communal, aiming to evolve the transient into permanence through process-driven transformation. Each composition becomes part of an ongoing exploration of rebirth—a tactile remembrance shaped by material memory and cultural continuity.
Soft in the Fire & Breathe Flowers. In Soft in the Fire & Breathe Flowers, material becomes metaphor. Using recycled silk, cardboard, and glass beads, these works explore sustainability as regeneration. The tactile richness of these elements creates immersive surfaces that speak to renewal, ancestral reverence, and the artistry inherent in reclamation.
Furious Flowers. Furious Flowers serves as a visual ode to the overlooked contributions of women—particularly African-American women—transforming florals into vessels of remembrance and woven histories. Through symbolic layering and cultural iconography, these works evoke a kind of material memory, where surface becomes archive and each gesture channels ancestral strength and lived experience.
Landscapes. In Landscapes, the boundaries between the natural world and urban grit dissolve into a rhythmic exploration of environment and memory, oscillating between recognition and abstraction. Moving beyond traditional representation, these works merge atmospheric gestures with urban mark-making. By allowing the landscape to breathe through layers of paint and erasure, I translate the vastness of the horizon through a language of textures. Here, organic forms are interrupted by the raw, gestural energy of street aesthetics, capturing the spirit of a place rather than its literal geography.
Bio
Cheryl L. Rogers is a native of Detroit, Michigan. She currently lives and works in New York City. Cheryl is a graduate of The University of Michigan (BGS), New York University (MPS), and The Parsons School of Design (AAS). She has also studied with abstract landscape painter Brian Rutenberg. Cheryl’s work has been shown throughout the eastern United States