Ashanté Josey

Ashanté Josey is a visual artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ashanté enjoys teaching art as an art instructor as well as doing independent commissions for new art collectors. Ashanté creates with a variety of mediums such as acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, and digital art. The main medium that she focuses on is acrylic on canvas. She centers her technique on blending. With influences as diverse as Frida Kahlo and Kehinde Wiley, faces are what she paints mostly. She appreciates their distinctiveness and the limitless conditions to creating portraits. Most of her work is black, symbolic pieces, with spirituality. She derives inspiration from impressionism, realism, abstractions, and symbolism; which can be seen in each piece.

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As a self-taught artist, her enthusiasm for painting was cultivated in high school in 2009, taking extracurricular art classes. Ashanté attended The Pennsylvania State University. During her time at Penn State, she continued to take multiple art courses to feed her need for creative freedom, while pursuing her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and History. After completing her degree in 2016, her interest in painting further developed.

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In 2018, Ashanté became a full-time visual artist. In March 2018, she successfully exhibited her first solo show and art collection, E11even. She recently exhibited her second collection in 2020, If God Were A Person. She hopes to create a new collection every other year. Ashanté has many exhibitions under her belt along with public art collectors. She has enjoyed her involvement on public projects with GetGo, Downtown Partnership, The Pittsburgh International Airport, The University of Pittsburgh, and more. With experience with many mediums, she is looking forward to using her art to heal, reaching as many people as she can with her art with work in museums, streets, schools, books, businesses; as well as looking into teaching art therapy.