Maya Dixon
Bio: Maya Dixon is a multidisciplinary visual artist working across video, sculpture, drawing, and installation. She reinterprets elements of her cultural heritage and symbols of freedom to critique systems of power. Inspired by her experience growing up in The Bronx and her Indo-Afro background, her work investigates identity, the commodification of the body, and historical memory, often engaging with materials and forms that evoke ancestral connections and the tension between tradition and reinvention. Dixon earned her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2022, where she honed her interdisciplinary approach and deepened her interest in installation. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University, set to graduate in the spring of 2025.
instagram @libertyshitty
Artist Statement: My work explores Black female collectivity, autonomy, and spiritual sovereignty by reinterpreting cultural symbols to reclaim agency for those historically silenced. The gourd, a prehistoric vessel, becomes a central motif—standing in for the Black female body as both a site of containment and transformation.
Gourds are paradoxes: hard yet fragile, open yet fortified. In my sculptures, they are not passive containers but entities that have grown their own defenses. Emerging horns —read as hair, spikes, or thorns—blurring the line between protection and expansion, between guarding and reaching. These forms recall nature’s survival strategies: spikey surfaces that deter, hard shells that protect, structures that evolve in response to the conditions that shape them. My work asks: Are they a defense against intrusion, or a reach towards something beyond confinement?
Just as the radicle, the first root to break ground, sustains future growth, the gourd in my work becomes both womb and seed; a sacred space where transformation takes shape. The tension between agency and vulnerability, protection and exposure, mirrors the lived experiences of black women in a world that seeks to confine them.
Maya Dixon
Flagpole, 2023
Single channel video, looped
2 minutes
84" x 55" x 36"
Courtesy of the artist