Kiah Celeste

Kiah Celeste (B.1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-dimensional artist whose work transcends fitting into one category or medium. Upon completing a BFA in Photography in 2016, Kiah moved into three dimensional production. Constantly searching and gleaning objects from urban and industrial environments, Kiah Celeste forages for materials that speak to her. Her practice consists of a few components, to which Celeste often incorporates a motif to establish a visual cadence of repetition, balance, motion and variation. Her free-standing work includes almost exclusively discarded or secondhand items, and minimal hardware, creating something new and fortuitous from decay. Recent stretched spandex framed works explore the meeting of sculpture and two-dimensionality while retaining foundations in found materiality and physics. By asserting the cruciality of sustainability, Kiah’s work negates the gratuitous nature of buying new, synthetic materials only to enter into inevitable disorder over time. Although these works are made with primarily synthetic, industrial and household materials, the forms they take on allude the organic, the surreal and non-function. She often challenges physics, with compositions which carefully balance through tension, weight, flexibility and gravity. These texturally rich compositions highlight the inherent beauty of the objects, while retiring their original practical functions. With a multifarious identity as a Black and Jewish woman, both feminine and androgynous, and introverted and social, among other contrasting combinations and in-betweens, the sense of her un-belonging finds respite in the embrace of seemingly disparate materials to create a cohesive whole, finding freedom in self, the world, and creative practice.

Celeste has completed artist residencies and exhibitions within the US and internationally including Lisbon, Barcelona, New York, Chicago and Italy. In 2021, Celeste received the inaugural 21C Artadia Award in Louisville, KY and the inaugural Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation Residency in 2025. Her work has been acquired by the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum and the UK Art Museum. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Burnaway, and ArtForum.