Mikaela
Perry
Media:
Painting, Multi-Disciplinary
Studio Location:
40-08 22nd St
Room/Studio#
Floor 2
Website:
Artist Bio:
Mikaela Perry is a figurative oil painter and former fifth-generation farmer. Her work primarily depicts human and animal figures, inviting viewers of her artwork to be in relationship with their own ancestral ties to land and nature. She has exhibited her work in group shows and juried exhibitions throughout the US, and in 2023 exhibited her first solo show at Solas Studio in the Flatiron District of New York City. Perry was honored as a recipient of the 2023 NYC 40 Under 40: Rising Stars in Food Policy Award for her representation of rural life and small farms, was selected as a 2024 Chashama ChaNorth Artist in Residence, and was a 2025 featured artist for the Six Foot Platform in Dumbo, Brooklyn, hosted by Brooklyn Arts Council and Team Dumbo . Her work has been featured in the AQ Quarterly Journal Vol. 1, curated by Ekaterina Popova, the City of New York’s Food Policy Center News, and published in the "Writing the Land" anthology in partnership with Hudson Taconic Land Trust. She received her BA in 2014 from Middlebury College and her MA from New York University in 2022.
Artist Statement:
I was the fifth and final generation in my family to tend our small Vermont farm. My twenty-five years of farming were defined by the psychic charge of rural space, where nonverbal communication with our animals came intuitively and strange encounters with wild animals were commonplace. With my ancestors’ bones resting in the soil nearby, through the land all generations lived simultaneously.
I use oil painting to mimic the rituals and seasonality of farming. Each painting begins by stretching linen with the same mallet that I once used to drive fence posts when rotating sheep through pastures. Sheep and other animals serve as symbols of my own family stories while wildflowers represent the liminality between place and the supernatural.
Now surrounded by the urban environment of New York City, canvas and paint replace soil and seed as the substrates through which I pass on my inherited knowledge of land stewardship.
