Tiffany Alexandria Avery-Shokes

Tiffany Alexandria is an artist originally from Chicago and currently based in Los Angeles. Alexandria received her Associates of Arts degree in Studio Art at Los Angeles Valley College, where she began to refine her skills in drawing and painting. Although she is an academically trained artist, Alexandria has been praised for embracing her unacademic artistic expression by her art professors and peers. Unconventional drawing techniques with conceptual rigor undergird the basis of her artwork.

Recently, most of Alexandria’s work explores female empowerment and unconventional female beauty. She uses abstraction and expressive techniques to deconstruct the face to exaggerate or minimize the female figure within a setting, to capture a personal psychological experience.

In developing her methodologies, Alexandria also started to delve into concepts of unconventional religion. With this concept she focuses on the power relationships man has to God in organized religion, and why organized religion creates fear. Her work aims to explore culture as well as people on an intimate and individual scale.

Working within these themes, portraiture is also a fascination of hers and she is committed to the practice of painting and drawing the faces of notable artists and great minds of whom she personally admires; that of which are contemporary heroes, as well as historical ones. Alexandria attempts to echo the personification and embodiment of her subjects into her portraits. Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh, Greta Thornberg, Stephan Colbert, and Bernie Sanders are some of the important faces she has painted and drawn.

At times, Tiffany finds her art canvas on salvaged materials, such as cardboard backings, ripped or damaged canvases, matboard, and scrap-wood as well as a variety of objects and materials that can be potentially used as her surface, to draw or paint on. This started because she couldn’t afford canvas and such materials for a period in her life; yet, now she chooses to use these scrap materials conceptually in her work, to incorporate what others may deem disposable into her artistic practice.

Alexandria is also a self-published children’s book author. She wrote, illustrated and self-published her first children’s book in 2016 titled, Barbra and Benny Love-bot Save Robotopia. She was inspired to write a children’s story that could colorfully and poetically speak to children in a philosophical way. Her goal with her children's book is to explain the fundamentals of life and the importance of persistence in the face of setbacks in order to succeed in life.

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Tiffany Alexandria Avery-Shokes