2026 CTF LA Resident

Crafting the Future is excited to spotlight Bridget DeLee, a Los Angeles based artist whose practice primarily spans painting and mixed media sculpture.

Bridget frequently incorporates materials with cultural significance to Los Angeles and the broader African diaspora. As she describes it, her practice "integrates painting, sculpture, and found materials to explore memory, lineage, and the passage of time." She is drawn to the ways personal and collective histories overlap, blur, and resurface through images, textures, and materials.

Los Angeles-based Artist Bridget DeLee

Painting: Layered Memory

Bridget's paintings interrelate with a limited color palette and skin pigment that displaces realism, shifting focus to inherent meaning and spiritual depth. Working from her family's photographic archive, she imagines these moments as layered compositions that question how time can be both preserved and transformed. In her paintings, she collapses generations of women from her lineage into shared spaces, allowing them to coexist across temporal boundaries — investigating how the past continues to inhabit the present, and how memory, like time itself, is constructed and reshaped through human experience and emotion.

Her work is inspired by family photos, urban changes, and sociopolitical themes like race, equity, and displacement.

Sculpture: Movement and Material

Bridget's sculptures function in contrast to her paintings. While the paintings are static reflections of memory, the sculptures carry a sense of movement, transformation, and material resonance. She incorporates elements such as synthetic hair, rope, fabric, and found objects — materials charged with personal significance and cultural memory. Each object is carefully gathered from lived experience, family belongings, or artifacts that serve as traces of past lives and histories.

Ultimately, her work seeks to make visible the echoes of generational experience—what she describes as the resonance of trauma—while preserving a sense of care, endurance, and connection.

Current Research: The Gullah Geechee South

Her recent research and practice has concentrated on South Carolina, emphasizing the customary art and practices retained by the Gullah Geechee people. Her research centers on the Low Country of South Carolina, exploring Gullah-Geechee cultural traditions — particularly sweetgrass basket weaving, the use of blue glass as a form of spiritual protection, and the intertwined histories of rice and cotton cultivation. These materials and histories form a conceptual foundation connecting her own ancestral narrative to the broader legacies of Black labor, survival, and creativity in the American South. Texts such as Black Rice and the notion of Concentric Pedagogy inform her thinking about how knowledge, craft, and resistance circulate through generations.

In her present body of work, Bridget is creating a series of indigo blue portraits that reflect identity, spirituality, and endurance. Indigo, once a symbol of labor and exploitation, becomes for her a pigment of resilience and memory — its deep hue a metaphor for the layered histories embedded in skin, water, and land. Alongside painting, she is experimenting with glass-fused surfaces, transforming painterly gestures into translucent layers that echo both fragility and permanence.

Through layering, juxtaposition, and material storytelling, she creates spaces where ancestral presence and contemporary self-hood intertwine, inviting viewers to encounter time as both cyclical and continuous.

Exhibitions & Recognition

Bridget's work has been exhibited at Durden and Ray, VAMA Gallery, The Mistake Room, Track16, Sovern LA, and Band of Vices. As an emerging artist, she has contributed to discussions on panels such as Art & Activism: Through the African American Experience. Her sculpture "In Between" was featured in the Los Angeles Times.

Her recognitions include the Winston Russell Hewitt Scholarship, the VAMA Scholarship Award, and the Macomber travel grant from USC Roski. She was also a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern during her time at CSUDH. DeLee holds a B.A. in Studio Art from California State University Dominguez Hills and an MFA in Art from USC Roski School of Art and Design.

View Bridget's work