Nia Musiba’s visual language is unmistakable across an ever-expanding roster of different media. This summer, we met at her new studio in inner southeast Portland to discuss her practice and upcoming solo exhibition Unseasonably Warm at One Grand Gallery, the gallery that had hosted her first solo show in 2022. Musiba’s figurative style remains coherent across the past and present works shown at One Grand. In Unseasonably Warm, Black bodies take up space, drawn in expressive states and surrounded by familiar shapes—flowers, hearts, stars, raindrops and butterflies—all together weaving accessibility with abstraction. 

While Musiba’s 2022 show featured acrylic paintings and a digital weaving, Unseasonably Warm showcases her recent explorations with new materials: colored pencil on soft, fibrous found paper and ceramic slab carvings and tiles created in collaboration with Sara Victorio of Hotel Ceramics. Musiba had ruminated on themes of spirals and spiraling while creating these works, swirling in personal memories of ending and renewal marked with symbols that recur in the churn. 

“I did a lot of creative writing in High School. And I never felt like a visual artist when I was growing up. I didn’t feel confident enough or supported,” Musiba explained as we chatted about her artistic trajectory. She went on to complete her studies in design as a college student, doing graphic and illustrative work. Though she did not have much time to experiment with fine arts in college, her experience working with a risograph printer led her to murals and painting. “I’m not usually thinking of the visual outcome first. I’m thinking about the concept,” she said. 

Traces of Musiba’s history of practices manifest in a series of drawings in Unseasonably Warm. Her penchant for both design and creative writing coalesces in figures and shapes as well as the lines of text that appear subtly within many of the drawings (this text also serves as the works’ titles). Musiba’s series of colored pencil works—pieces drawn specifically for this show that collectively form the threads of a story—begins with a drawing of two bodies side-by-side amidst gigantic rain drops. One figure prepares to catch a drop in their open palm against a sultry mustard sky. Words etched over this figures’ arm in subtle print catch my eye: “I cried upon your arrival.” Within this composition, I sense the fluctuations of heating and cooling with the warm yellow and rain, excitement and release articulated by the two dynamic figures, and a cascade of other sensations difficult to parse. 

An emotional trajectory progresses across all Musiba’s drawings as they extend from one side of the gallery to the other. Like a children’s book or a graphic novel, she has rendered an epoch of symbol and poetics that feel within reach while still opening up to wells of complexity. The text within Musiba’s drawings is peculiar, printed in capital letters such that all the empty spaces of letters—the center of the “O” or the hollow of the “R”—are filled in, like a hand-printed font. 

“I feel like this show is loosely a representation of the past two years of my life,” said Musiba. She spoke about her parents’ move away from her childhood home, her graduation from college, and her first heartbreak, all of which transpired since her previous solo show at One Grand. “A lot of shifts and changes have happened, but oftentimes I’m ending up back at the same place, the end of a cycle, the beginning of a cycle.” 

In another drawing a single figure fills the frame, bending forward at the waist. Their posture sends energy up and down simultaneously, like a circuit. Just beyond their downward reaching fingertips, I read the work title: You mean the world to me. One of the figure’s arms overlaps with their opposite leg, creating a small portal of space between these limbs in the center of the drawing. A green vine enwraps the figure’s other leg, coiling upward into a hypnotic spiral above them. The presence of portal and spiral imagery reads symbolically, as if to indicate this figure has been here before and will be here again, time traveling. 

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“It’s a series of losing the joy and finding the joy again,” Musiba explained. 

As we discussed her figurative work across her practices, she said, “My desire to do bodies the way I do them is just a reflection of wanting to represent myself and Black bodies in a different way,” adding, “I just like playing with the proportions of things.” 

Musiba began drawing her human figures so that they take up space, literally and emotionally. They appear fluid, flexing, bending and evolving. She also crafts her figures with small, dynamic heads. At first encounter, I read this as an indication of emotionality and intelligence that exists holistically, head to toe, bucking the body/mind split. “The small heads have definitely always been intentional,” Musiba underscored, when I brought up this attribute of her figures. She spoke about her own cerebral tendencies as well as her complicated relationship to inhabiting a physical form. “It’s very healing to focus on the body in my work,” she reflected. 

We also discussed her use of different media. For her part, she shared, “Obviously I can’t prevent people from just knowing me for one thing, but, I was like, I want to prevent myself from feeling like I’m a one-trick pony.” In a way, Musiba’s exploratory making could be interpreted as care toward all kinds of bodies—physical, figurative and even bodies of work—generating new conduits of existence for ideas to cycle through. 

To that end, the content of Unseasonably Warm is heavily punctuated with ceramic works, Musiba’s most recent venture. Their glow and sheen balance the matte finish of her colored pencil drawings. Musiba worked with her collaborator, Victorio, on these. She carved shapes like eyes, hearts, butterflies into their soft clay surfaces and handed them off to Victorio to glaze and fire in the kiln. The shapes in each piece carry auras of indeterminate emotion, as if floating in the mix of many feelings, but all Musiba’s ceramic works can also be characterized by balanced composition that grounds them. 

One slab carving catches my eye at the entrance to the show, the very first piece. It is a red heart that grows upward from blades of grass like a flower. Two yellow flower-heads spoke from each side. I recognize this shape from a photo Musiba showed me on her phone during our chat: it is a drawing from her second grade journal that she discovered in her parents’ home and recreated here. The concept of repetition, patterns, and cycles comes to bear through the pointed simplicity of Musiba’s choice in shapes, including her original heart figure, now immortalized in clay. 

“It just makes sense to have the shapes that have showed up and probably will continue to show up throughout my practice,” she said. The shapes present in this exhibition refer back to the shapes Musiba would repeatedly draw as a child, legible forms full of room for symbolic interpretation and reinterpretation, which create portals across her practice through time. 

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The cosmology of Unseasonably Warm exists in Musiba’s use of media, shapes, figures and text, unsettling supposed functions and static meanings. In her work, The abstraction of feeling, Musiba has taken squares of colored pencil drawings on fibrous paper and sewn these together in a kind of miniature quilt that tells a story of mixed emotion through ambiguous, shape-shifting imagery. Perhaps this work summarizes the ethos of “Unreasonably Warm”—unexpected and abstracted feelings made familiar again through repetition, cycles and spiraling. 

One Grand Gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays 12-5 PM and Saturdays 12-3 PM, as well as by appointment. One Grand Gallery has programmed several community events in conjunction with Unseasonably Warm: 

• Floral Still-Life Drawing Night on Thursday, 8/22, 6-8 PM
• Life Figure Drawing Night on Thursday 8/29, 6-8 PM
• Flash Tattoo Day (feat. flash in collaboration with Nia) with Jules & Han on Sunday 9/8, 10 AM – 6 PM 
• Artist Talk with Nia Musiba on Friday, 9/13, 5-6 PM, an hour before the official closing reception