Artist + Designer Nia Keturah Calhoun Makes Space for Joy

Perhaps most known for her murals — which can be seen around the District — artist and designer Nia Keturah Calhoun believes simply existing authentically and creating concepts that connect with people, in any form, is art. 

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When I meet Park View-based artist and designer Nia Keturah Calhoun, her partner and dog (a boxer, aptly named Cassius) are scurrying out of frame to give her the room for our interview.

“I’m obsessed with him maybe a little bit,” Calhoun says, gazing after Cassius for a moment before turning back to the screen. “He’s so emotive. It’s like there’s a little grown man walking around our house all the time.”

Calhoun is sitting in her living room, prints of her own art adorning the wall behind her. She’s wearing a white long- sleeved T-shirt, purchased from the streetwear boutique Commonwealth in Northwest, with “by any means necessary” in block letters across the chest — a nod to the phrase popularized by Malcolm X less than a year before his death.

“A lot of people see it as a call to violence, which I don’t,” she says. “To me, it’s just that there are certain things in this life that are non-negotiables, and I will do what I have to do to maintain those things. Peace of mind is non-negotiable. I won’t live in a state of anxiety or worry. So whatever I have to do to achieve peace, it’s by any means necessary.”

One of the featured artists at District Fray’s Capital Pride kick-off event on June 3 (hosted in collaboration with Selina Union Market & Cowork), Calhoun tells me she’ll otherwise be taking Pride Month for herself.

“I’m Black and I’m queer, so usually there’s this expectation [during Black History Month and Pride Month]: ‘Oh my gosh, this is your time! You can go out and make art.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I do that 365.’ So I’m taking time to just stay in and read some books that I’ve been wanting to read and hang with my people.”

During the course of our conversation, I learn it’s exactly this ethos — that simply being and creating authentically is enough to make art — that epitomizes Calhoun’s approach to creative life.

Calhoun spent her early years in North Carolina, where her father was a pastor. She remembers drawing for the first time to stay quiet, channeling her ADHD into art while watching her father preach in the Black churches she grew up in.

“I think how I first started focusing my brain was through art,” Calhoun says. “By drawing him while he was preaching, I would listen more deeply and intently to what he was saying and try to put that into my drawings. I’m sure it wasn’t great, but it’s always been that undercurrent of trying to capture what was happening in sacred spaces.”

When she was 8, Calhoun’s family returned to D.C., where her father was from. She went on to attend Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, dropping out part way through to make a mixtape. From there, she joined an art collective, taught at the Hirshhorn and worked as a graphic designer before Peter Chang and Brandon Hill from No Kings Collective invited her to paint with them. With No Kings, she learned to make big pictures on walls, including designing the nationally recognized Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mural on 14th Street after the judge’s historic confirmation to the Supreme Court. Reflecting on her career, Calhoun finds a throughline in making concepts that connect with people.

“Even during blips of my life where I’m like, ‘Let me go find a big-girl job,’ it’s always felt in the vein of art,” she says. “My core belief is that everyone’s always doing their own kind of art. How people move through the world — the way a host will greet somebody at a restaurant — that’s art. You’re creating a way to connect with people and, on the most visceral level, that’s art.”

These days, Calhoun finds most joy in making art that feels honest — the most genuine expression of who she is, when making art in D.C. sometimes means facing expectations or pressure to be political. Authentically representing herself, she believes, is just as important.

“I think we’re experiencing a moment of expansiveness, which is really awesome and always feels at the precipice of being endangered through legislation or popular sentiment, so it also feels like something that has to be protected,” Calhoun says. “So just making art that is innately Black and queer because that’s who I am — it just feels like precious work.”

For District Fray’s Pride event, Calhoun says she wants to share that joy with others.

“I’ve just been really obsessed with cartoons recently, and so I’m making some very queer Black characters,” Calhoun says. “It’s the first day of Pride, it’s pop-out season, it’s time to go outside and be happy, and so I really just want to throw joy on the board through these avatar characters that all kind of identify with bits of me and folks who I love and look up to.”

She hopes people will see themselves in her characters, too, perhaps in a way they haven’t felt represented before — the way she felt when she first encountered “The Boondocks” in elementary school, trying to convince her parents to buy her the book at Barnes & Noble.

She turns her screen to give me a sneak peek of one of the characters she’s been working on: a Black man with hot pink hair, diamond earrings, a nose ring, a full beard and a chain that says “Baddie.” Speaking faster and faster, she tells me her plans for him: fierce pink eyelashes, cuts in his eyebrows, a neck tattoo that says “love,” a cross tattoo on his arm.

“What I really love about him is he’s really in touch with peak masculinity and peak femininity at the same time,” she says. “He’s like, ‘No, they’re both me. Yes, and.’”

She pauses, gazing at him adoringly: this person she created to exist boldly, to hold parts of herself, of everyone.

“I’m in love with him. I think he’s wonderful. And I want nothing but the best in this world for him.”

Keep up with Calhoun online at nias.work and follow her on Instagram @niaketurah.

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