Antwoine Washington’s path to becoming an artist was neither linear nor predetermined. Before committing to painting full-time, he worked as a mail carrier with the United States Postal Service. The rhythm of walking routes, moving through neighborhoods, and witnessing the everyday intimacies of domestic life sharpened his sensitivity to family, place, and the quiet gestures that shape belonging. In 2018, Washington survived a stroke that forced him to pause and re-evaluate his life and direction. The experience deepened his understanding of care, vulnerability, and the fragility of the everyday—elements that now resonate throughout both his portraits of Black familial life and his more abstract paintings.

Washington often works with house paint, a medium intimately tied to domestic space and everyday labor. The flat, matte surfaces it creates recall memory—rooms lived in, spaces cared for, walls touched over time. Using house paint resists hierarchies of “fine art” materials and aligns his practice with the lived textures of home, kinship, and working-class histories. It is both a formal decision and a political one: to honor the beauty of the spaces where Black life unfolds.

“My work is inspired by the Black experience in America,” he says. “Through drawing and painting, I am focused on creating realistic storytelling portraits—bold, colorful work that shows the emotion of what Black Americans go through on a day-to-day basis. The past often reminds us how far we’ve come as a society, given this nation’s original sin concerning racial inequalities.”

Washington traces his earliest artistic influence to his uncle, whose detailed drawings arrived in letters from prison. That formative recognition—that creativity can survive even within systems of confinement—continues to animate his work. Drawing from the Harlem Renaissance, West African visual languages, and the aesthetics of vernacular photography, his paintings foreground kinship and care.

Washington speaks openly about how his stroke reshaped his life and practice. “Suddenly, half my body was numb. My memory wasn’t the same. Creating art became my rehabilitation, my way of reconstructing myself. Each piece is a testament to survival, to transformation.” Grief and resilience are central to his current work, especially in his memorial portraits honoring his late grandmothers—matriarchs who held the emotional architecture of family.

“We go into museums and are captivated by European masterpieces—Renaissance, Impressionism, all of it. But where is the conversation on the Harlem Renaissance? Where do we center the artists who look like us, who created a legacy that speaks directly to our culture?” This question sits at the heart of his practice.

In 2020, Washington co-founded Black Art Speaks in Detroit, an initiative bringing public art and community programming into shared spaces to amplify Black voices and histories. The project reflects the same grounded ethos present in his studio work: that the lives, stories, and interior worlds of Black families are essential and must be seen.

Washington received his B.A. in Studio Art from Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, LA. He currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio and is represented by Shaheen Gallery. Recent paintings are on view in "New Work: FRONT Fellows Show" at The Cleveland Museum of Art and new works will be featured at COL in September 2026.