About

The record.

Courtney Alexander is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, publisher, and cultural worker born in Pahokee, Florida, and based in Chicago, IL. Her practice moves through painting, installation, film, ritual, self portraiture, and storytelling to explore Blackness, divinity, memory, embodiment, and the spiritual force of what has been discarded, inherited, and transformed. She is the creator of Dust II Onyx, the first widely distributed tarot deck by a Black artist, developed from a 78 painting mixed media series. Her work has expanded into ritual performance, film, and installation through projects such as God Is, an evolving work centered on sacredness, witness, offering, and the body as a site of return.

The intent.

My practice asks who gets to be holy. I make work from my body, my spiritual practice, my memories, and the places that shaped me. Across painting, installation, film, ritual, and self portraiture, I return to Blackness, fatness, queerness, divinity, and the stories we inherit about worth, beauty, freedom, and reverence. Over time, this practice has become both altar and archive. It is a way of calling my own spirit back into my body, preserving what should not be lost, and making room for new myths to take form.

The arc.

I came to this work through my own need to remember myself differently. What began in self portraiture and painting has grown into a larger practice shaped by ritual, image, land, story, and spirit. From Dust to Onyx taught me how an image could become a system for holding culture and transformation. God Is has carried that inquiry into performance, film, regalia, offering, and public witness. Now, my work is turning toward Pahokee, Florida, the place I was born, as I build new mythologies from the land, memory, and spirit of where I come from.