Painting the architecture of belonging

Josiane Faubert was born in Gabon, lived in France, and now lives and works in Seattle. Moving across geographies and cultures has shaped her understanding of home, not as a single place, but as something we make, carry, and remake throughout our lives.

She came to oil painting without formal training, drawn to the medium’s warmth, its capacity to hold light and color, and its long history of placing certain people inside certain rooms. Her paintings center Black women in domestic interiors, often beginning with an emotional experience: the need for time alone, missing a friend, the contradictions of motherhood, or the experience of building a life away from home.

Her women read, rest, dress, gather, leave, and care for one another. They inhabit rooms assembled from memory, observation, and contemporary visual culture, where African dress, sneakers, pattern, furniture, and objects from different places can exist without explanation. Faubert is interested in lives shaped by more than one place, and in the ordinary moments through which women make those lives their own.

Care and strength recur throughout the work, but so do solitude, vulnerability, friendship, and joy. Faubert is particularly interested in the expectation that women must always be strong, and in what becomes possible when they are allowed to put something down.

At the heart of her practice is a simple proposition: a life is made of what we inherit, what we carry, and what we choose for ourselves.

Faubert received Second Place in the 61st Annual Juried Competition at the Masur Museum of Art, juried by Kerry Inman of Inman Gallery, Houston. Her work is held in private collections and is available for exhibition.

She is also the founder of PICHA, a platform amplifying Afrocentric visual storytelling, but painting is where she lives.