Ya Levy-La’ford is an artist, educator and foremost a transporter working between the visual and our community through a wide range of mediums including paint, sculpture, installation, video and sound. La'ford is known for her site-specific installations of her bold, geometric paintings to explore themes of transformation and transcendence. She builds each work with a unique vocabulary of intersecting lines and gestural repetition that create distinctive visual impact. Her labyrinth patterns are both an exploration of self and place, as well as a reflection of her Jamaican background. Complex yet minimal, La’ford’s work emphasizes contrasts between light and dark, positive and negative space and draw connections between interconnectivity and healing.
Her site specific work, seeks to express a living partnership between people, our relationship to space and the natural world around us expressed through multi-dimensional objects that parallel the political, cultural and historical impacts therein. Through the exploration of linear and cyclical geometric labyrinths, her spectators are challenged to juxtapose personal vs conventional thinking, engaging in difficult conversations on a topics across seemingly impossible divides. Reaction and social consciousness are the tools of the viewer to experience art as a vehicle of change, healing and to unite people under a banner of transformed national identity.
La’ford has exhibited her work in the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. To mention a few La’ford has recently completed projects with University of South Florida, where she recreated an entire bulling, she was listed as one of the prestigious Florida Prize exhibitors at the Orlando Museum of Fine Art, completed 10 x 20 foot exterior architectural installation with renown architect David Adayje, she just recreated Rays tunnel as a part of SHINE, was a part of the Skyway exhibition, where she created a site-specific installation at Tampa Museum of Fine Art. She has partnered with Tampa Bay Rays, Nike, Louis Vuitton, St. Petersburg Holocaust Museum, Libraries across America, Venice Biennale activation projects, Smith and Associates, TBBCA and had been recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow in Washington DC, 2018 Tampa Best of the Bay Artist, Named most important artist by Jamaican National Gallery and she is presently hired by the city of Pompano as Artist in resident, continuing to use art as a catalyst of change across the community, she is also a finalist for Creative Pinellas Traveling Public Art Project, among many more. Upcoming she has community work in Chicago, Art Basel, Development transformation projection and work with Converse.
She earned her BFA Magna Cum Laude in Painting at Florida State University; a Law degree, Cum Laude from Levin College of Law, University of Florida; and received her MFA with High Honors in Interdisciplinary Art from the Art Institute, Boston.
