Chris Friday is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami. Her work explores themes of Black culture, identity, rest, opacity, and supplementing archives as a way of advocating and claiming space for those that are historically excluded from them.
Often incorporating a black-and-white Chalkboard aesthetic, which plays on concepts of learning and teaching, she analyzes mainstream media to identify problematic perspectives and their origins, question the legitimacy of such perspectives, and offer possible solutions in her work. Recent large-scale drawings depict Black bodies in acts of leisure, at play, and in repose, as a means of opting out of stereotypically portraying Black bodies in various scenes of trauma, pain, or over-sexualization.
Accompanied by comic-style graphic illustrations and text that allude to desired and imagined environments and context, she gives her subjects the rest and privacy they are entitled to, even while on display reflecting the longing to achieve this for herself, her family, and her community in waking life Friday’s portfolio features large-scale works on paper, murals, video, ceramics, projections, photography, comic illustrations, installations and social practice/activism.
Friday’s work has been included in exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include “Where We Never Grow Old” at Sarasota Art Museum (2025), “Good Times” at Oolite Arts (2023) and “One More River” (2022) at Austin Peay State University. Notable group exhibitions include Glory at NXTHVN (2026), “Rest is Power” (2023) at New York University’s Center For Black Visual Culture, and “The Cartography Project” presented by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (2022).
Friday has received numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including being named the 2023 SouthArts Southern Prize and State Fellow for the State of Florida, receiving a Knight Foundation “Knights Champion” support grant (2022), as well as residencies with MassMoCA (2023), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2022), and the Visual Arts Residency at Chautauqua Institute (2019).