Grace Cross (b. Harare, Zimbabwe 1988) is a material painter who draws symbols about motherhood, home, belief structures, and land; making shifting recipe’s rooted in history, performative archaeology and African cosmology, to reflect her cultural transmission across national boundaries. Her work conjures a deep history, bringing transformative cultural wisdoms and materials together to excavate and perforate boundaries of motherhood.
Her childhood and young adulthood was spent between continents; she was brought up in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Greece, India and the USA. Her diverse upbringing informs her painting practice, where she fuses cultural storytelling, spirituality, and the archaeological mining of symbols in her material and colour-filled works.
She graduated with her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 and holds a BFA from the Michaelis School of Art for which she was awarded the Judy Steiner painting prize in 2010. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions locally and abroad. She had a year long exhibit at The Vault, the Silo Hotel Gallery in 2021, and participated in the Cubicle Series at Everard Read Gallery in 2021. Cross is a grant recipient from University of Illinois at Chicago and National Arts Council, South Africa. She has works in the collections of the Africa First Collection, Spier Arts Trust and the University of Cape Town among others.
Cross lives and works as a mother and painter in Cape Town.