July 8, 2019
by Abigail Stone
Artist Alexandra Grant creates powerful, provocative work, collaged from text and shapes, paint and paper, ink and wax, lines and curves, that upends hate and chaos, transforming them into love and beauty.
It wasn’t really that surprising to discover that artist Alexandra Grant and writer Roxane Gay went to high school together. There’s an intersection between their similar battles against the canon of expectation that have driven the western world — and the place of women — for centuries. In Grant’s case, the seeds for that were put in place when she was still young. An only child born to two college professors in the Midwest, she was funneled through Paris and Mexico City. Being over six feet, a quality she shares with Gay, now with prematurely white hair, she has always stood out. She found solace from her otherness in the world of books. “I think part of my attraction to becoming an artist,” says Grant, who had entered college to study math but then switched her major, “was to finally have a shared language with people that wasn’t dependent on location or nationality.”
