About the Artist
Michaela Yearwood-Dan
In her first UK institutional museum exhibition
Michaela Yearwood-Dan (b 1994 London) endeavours to build spaces of community, abundance, and joy, through a multifaceted practice encompassing large scale paintings, works on paper, ceramics, and site-specific mural and sound installations.
Yearwood-Dan’s unique visual language draws on a diverse range of influences, including Blackness, queerness, femininity, and healing rituals, often combining art historical references with pop culture. Within her paintings and ceramics, she inscribes lines of text pulled from song lyrics, poetry, or her own diaristic writings. These meditations, appearing at various scales and degrees of legibility, are insightful and funny, confident and questioning.
Her words beckon the viewer into a vivid, welcoming world of paradox, play, and contemplation formed within an atmosphere of swirling forms and brilliant chromaticity.
Yearwood-Dan’s work has been shown at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; York Art Gallery (UK); and in the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (USA); Palazzo Monti, Brescia (Italy); and the Museum of Contemporary African Art, Marrakesh (Morocco), among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Government Art Collection (UK), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Crocker Art Museum; the Jorge M. Perez Collection; and the Columbus Museum of Art and the Pizzuti Collection (USA). She lives and works in London.
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Exhibition listing
Michaela Yearwood-Dan: The Practice of Liberation
17 April – 18 October 2026
the Whitworth
Free entry
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Image: Michaela Yearwood-Dan, portrait of the artist© Michaela Yearwood-Dan Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirthand Marianne Boesky Gallery Photographer: Ash Tomkins.