Mia Lee

Mía Lee (born 1992) is an American artist who works primarily in painting and textile design. Her artwork is cartoonish with themes from her own experiences. Mía focuses on figurative paintings that depict familiar and human experiences, delicacies of relationships, and emotions from a first and third person perspective using her characters, “the Gentleman, the Lady, and the Demon.” The patterns she uses are then pulled from her larger paintings and translated into wearable textile items to fully immerse the viewer into her world. She has had several high-profile clothes design collaborations.

Background Lee was born in 1992 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, where she was raised. the Chicago neighborhood in which she was raised. Lee's work arises from her maternal influences. Her mother was a painter. One grandmother was also a painter (and pianist), while the other was a seamstress. Lee views her art and designs as work created from the perspective of a Caribbean Black woman who was raised on the South Side of Chicago.

Work

Lee's COVID-19 pandemic-induced foray into social media facilitated her first artwork sale of Gentleman in Green in 2021. Her art became the cover art for the single, and she was in the song's music video. The artwork, which portrays a black couple with a burning house as a backdrop, is regarded as an updated version of American Gothic from the perspective of the African diaspora.