Artists

About

Miranda Kyle is a watercolor painter who also creates murals, often centering people of color in her work. Born and raised in Detroit, Kyle earned her BFA in Illustration with a minor in Art History from the College for Creative Studies in 2021, and later returned to complete her certification in Art Education. In 2023, she was awarded a Kresge Artist Fellowship, recognizing her contributions to the visual arts in Detroit.
Her practice explores memory, identity, and storytelling, drawing inspiration from both personal experience and the people around her. Kyle views each artwork as an individual narrative, but also part of a larger, evolving story—where paintings interact like fragments of memory, puzzle pieces, or refrigerator magnets forming unexpected connections. Her work resists linear storytelling, instead embracing layered meaning and shifting perspectives depending on where and how it is shown. Through this, she invites viewers to find parts of themselves within the stories she paints.

Artist Statement

Art for me has always served as an outlet for self expression and allowed me to speak my most honest truth when I felt I could not. It really allowed me to evaluate my past, live freely in my present, and to expand my future. Art has allowed me to rediscover and transform who I am numerous times; Being able to challenge my own principles and ideals by stepping out of my comfort zone in medium as well as subjects. I didn’t realize how much art would influence my day to day life until I pursued a higher education in it. College introduced me to so many other artists and their processes. I even changed mediums entirely from standard graphite drawings to full fledged watercolor installations and even digital illustrations.

My process with creating took a whole new form when I decided to get my BFA in Illustration. It all started with doing normal watercolor paintings for class, and one day I overworked a painting to no return due to watercolor not being a forgiving medium. When turning in the final project and accepting my defeat as a lesson learned, the professor I had the time gave me the idea of finding the redeeming elements of the piece and cutting them out. At first I was terrified to do this, thinking this would officially be the end of this painting's life, but it ended up working. Further down the line in college, other professors I had began showing me a technique where they would rip the outer edges of their square shaped paintings to give it more character, and that’s where the idea was born! I began ripping out each piece of my paintings after painting one object at a time, and began to collage them together like a puzzle or refrigerator magnets. This grew over time especially during the quarantine when I had nothing else to do to bring myself joy, which was painting and figuring out how I would make this art degree work no matter what.

My journey throughout life as well as the people I’ve had the privilege of establishing relationships with inspire me the most, whether it being negative or positive. I love taking simple ideas, then transforming it into an almost unrecognizable illustration until you ponder on it long enough to come up with your own interpretation. I enjoy the idea of my art having separate pieces, and being able to collage different stories that I tell in each individual painting together. It brings all of my ideas and inspirations from myself or other people together into one perspective, and it constantly changes depending on the tale I decide for each showing. A saying that I came up with that I constantly keep in mind is “We are who we are, because of where we’ve been”, and tagging that along with the idea of iconic magnets from childhood. Growing up, my parents always collected magnets from random stores, places they’ve visited, or ones that family gave us from their travels. I would always sit in the kitchen while my mom would cook, rearranging various letters and photo magnets, to make unique compositions. So in a sense, I was literally arranging the inspiration for my art in the present time.