Artist Tyanna Buie’s Screen Printed Memories

Detroit-based print artist Tyanna Buie creates large works and installations primarily using screen printing and hand-painted water-soluble Caran d’Ache. The base for her life-size prints involves using PhotoShop to magnify found family photographs printed in sections and reassembled. The resulting screen print and Caran d’Ache mix on paper gives her bold, colorful work the airy aesthetic of fabric. 

Growing up as a foster child in the midwestern USA, Buie was constantly changing homes and leaving photographs behind. Through her artwork, she reconnects with estranged family members in search of her lost photos. Buie’s exhibition Mimetic Gestures at the Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit this spring featured family portraits and installations composed from her reclaimed photo collection. Creating the exhibit for the gallery space, she screen-printed floor-to-ceiling wallpaper as a backdrop.  

Buie, who has received awards including a 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, currently serves as Assistant Professor and Section Chair of Printmaking at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Her first solo museum exhibition will be at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in the spring of 2019.