Akilah Watts Barbadian, b. 1996
Akilah Watts’ art is an act of remembering — and of reimagining. Her paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works reach deep into the textures of Caribbean life to explore how identity, heritage, and place intertwine. For Watts, art is not merely an image on a surface; it is a dialogue between past and present, between the personal and the collective, between what is seen and what is felt.
Akilah Watts’ art is an act of remembering — and of reimagining. Her paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works reach deep into the textures of Caribbean life to explore how identity, heritage, and place intertwine. For Watts, art is not merely an image on a surface; it is a dialogue between past and present, between the personal and the collective, between what is seen and what is felt.
Born in Barbados in 1996, Watts grew up amid the rhythms of island life — the scent of salt and sugarcane, the cadence of local dialect, the ritual of Sunday gatherings and school plaits. These impressions form the emotional language of her work. After earning her BFA from the Barbados Community College in 2017, she quickly began exhibiting internationally, making her debut that same year at the Prizm Art Fair in Miami. Since then, her practice has evolved into a deeply personal meditation on selfhood, womanhood, and the shifting image of the Caribbean in global imagination.
Watts’ visual world is one of contrasts — lush yet restrained, intimate yet expansive. She paints and constructs with sensitivity to texture, layering fabric, paint, and pattern in ways that echo the complexity of cultural inheritance. Her celebrated series Beautifully Braided examines the power and poetry of natural hair as both adornment and statement, transforming familiar Caribbean motifs into symbols of pride and continuity. In Moments From My Island Home, she turns her gaze toward the landscape itself, revealing the tension between the idealized postcard version of Barbados and the lived realities that breathe beneath it.
For Watts, creation is a process of reconciliation — between memory and myth, between the beauty of paradise and the unease it can conceal. The women and children in her work appear both grounded and transcendent, rooted in their environment yet carrying within them entire histories of migration, survival, and grace. Her art becomes a mirror of the island’s complexity: a place of warmth and welcome, but also of layers, stories, and quiet resilience.
Across her practice — painting, drawing, sculpture, and relief — Watts continually pushes at the boundary between image and experience. Each piece invites the viewer to look closer: at texture, at gesture, at the way light grazes a curl or fabric pattern. Beneath the surface beauty lies a deeper question about belonging — who gets to define paradise, and whose stories are told within it.
Watts has exhibited across the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, including presentations in New York, San Francisco, and the World Trade Center. Her work has been featured by Artsy, Artnet, Art-LeadHER, and numerous Caribbean art platforms. Alongside her studio practice, she has embraced curatorial and collaborative projects, such as her conceptual Greedy Gift Shop initiative, exploring how art and commerce shape the local creative economy.
Ultimately, Akilah Watts’ art is a celebration of transformation — of turning the everyday into the extraordinary, and the ordinary gesture into a declaration of presence. In each stroke and contour, she reveals the pulse of her island and the universality of its truths: that beauty is born not from perfection, but from authenticity, resilience, and the courage to see oneself clearly.