About
I am dead serious about joy and my work is an exuberant insistence on hope—an unapologetic reclamation of agency, visibility, and care. Through a process-based, materially exploratory practice, I make abstract sculptures and paintings that embrace conceptions of communal empowerment, joy as resilience, and hope as practice.
Kristy Hughes (b. Waxahachie, TX) creates vibrant abstract sculptures and paintings that reclaim agency through color, form, texture, and found materials. She transforms discarded and embedded objects into caring acts of resistance and preserved memory. Her work is influenced by her ancestral lineage from the Genízaro Nation of New Mexico and experiences growing up within high-control evangelical religious institutions. Insistent on hope and repair, Hughes is dead serious about joy—her works are monuments for autonomy, care, and belonging.
Supported by fellowships at NXTHVN, The Fine Arts Work Center, and Vermont Studio Center, Hughes has been artist-in-residence at The Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, The Golden Arts Foundation, and The Studios at MASS MoCA, among several others. In 2025 she received the Rema Hort Mann Fund Emerging Artist Grant. She will be artist-in- residence at Yaddo upcoming Nov. of this year.
Hughes earned an MFA in Printmaking from Indiana University and a MA and BA in Studio Art from Eastern Illinois University. Recent exhibitions include: James Cohan Gallery, Brandeis University, and The Sculpture Center. Select publications include: The New York Times, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, Artsy, and New American Paintings. Hughes has a new public sculpture on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT through 2027 and is part of the inaugural Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me.
Kristy works in New Haven, CT.
Short CV here