Just a year after earning her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Kaylyn Webster has celebrated her first solo exhibition at a museum. Her show, titled “Commune (verb),” opened in October at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.
“I remember like it was just yesterday, coming to field trips here,” she says. “I went to Overton High School and Colonial Middle, and we would come up here all the time and look at other people’s work, and now it’s mine up here. It’s insane to me.”
The pieces in the show, Webster explains, are portraits of her family members and close friends. “I want to humanize the figures that I painted and hopefully to also humanize people of color in general,” she says. “I want [viewers] to want to know more about these people and their stories.”
For her paintings, Webster shares intimate moments with her loved ones, from the jubilant with her nephews playing horns, clad in Nikes and Jordans, to the more vulnerable with her mother recovering from Covid at the height of the pandemic. The paintings themselves are large in scale, practically larger than the artist herself. “I really want you to feel like you’re a part of these intimate moments,” Webster says.
In composing her works, Webster channels the styles and techniques of the art she learned about in her Western art courses, the very art that historically excluded Black men and women. “I love the style of it, the realism,” she says. “I love the symbolism and the deep narratives and the scale of it. I just wanted to represent people of color using those techniques.”
Yet she adds, “I always want at least one figure looking out at viewers to engage them more in the piece, and to challenge that trend that I saw in art history of Black servants and maids just not being able to look out. It’s almost like a tool to dehumanize them, so I want the stares to re-humanize the figures.”
Only one painting in the show features a person Webster does not know, a woman who upon meeting her in her studio space at Arrow Creative handed Webster a photograph of herself. “She wasn’t going to do anything with the photo, so she allowed me to paint it,” Webster says. “I feel like you can get to know her through her smile, the wrinkles in her face, her hands. I don’t know this woman, but I was able to connect with her. I guess that’s an example of myself participating in the effect that I want to have on other people as they see the show. … I just hope people can feel the emotions for these figures that I feel for them in real life and take that empathy and respect that they have from this exhibition and extend it to people they encounter in everyday life.”
“Kaylyn Webster: Commune (verb),” Dixon Gallery & Gardens, 4339 Park, on display through January 7.
