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Contemporary portraiture · Chicago

Art with
purpose.

Black dignity, interior life, ancestral presence, and narrative sovereignty—rendered at a scale that refuses to be overlooked.

View selected works
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair2026 · 48 × 48 in.
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
Little Boy in a Tan Suit
Little Boy in a Tan Suit
Dave Chappelle: Freedom of Speech
Dave Chappelle: Freedom of Speech
The Thinker
The Thinker
Two Girls on a Bench
Two Girls on a Bench
Over East
Over East

Selected works · 2005–2026

The work holds
its own gaze.

Portraits that borrow the authority of the canon, then question who constructed its boundaries.

All featured works are available as originals and fine-art prints, except Percy and Good Night Mama, which are offered exclusively as limited-edition prints. View availability and print details

Little Boy in a Tan Suit2026 · Oil on canvas · 48 × 48 in.
Dave Chappelle: Freedom of Speech2025 · Oil on canvas · 48 × 48 in.
Crouching Young Man2026 · Oil on canvas · 20 × 20 in.
Two Girls on a Bench2026 · Oil on canvas · 20 × 20 in.
The Thinker2025 · Oil on canvas · 48 × 48 in.
Percy2026 · Oil on canvas · 48 × 48 in.
Over East2024 · Oil on canvas · 48 × 48 in.
Girl Dad2025 · Oil on canvas · 48 × 48 in.
The Shaman2024 · Oil on canvas · 40 × 30 in.
Wisdom2024 · Oil on canvas · 40 × 30 in.
Good Night Mama2005 · Watercolor & gouache · 48 × 32 in.

Studio practice

Frame as ornament.
Frame as threshold.

The painted gold frame is part of the painting—and gold is its own visual code. From Byzantine sacred light and royal portraiture to gilded salon frames, gold-framed daguerreotypes, gold teeth, and gold rims, its meanings evolve while it continues to signal value, power, visibility, and belonging.

01

Respect

The Respect series begins with a question: Who is deemed deserving of respect—and who has held the authority to decide? By placing contemporary Black subjects within the visual language of canonical portraiture, the work examines how ideas of status, propriety, beauty, and cultural authority are constructed, repeated, and ultimately accepted as canon.

These painted gold frames function as ornament, threshold, boundary, and constraint. As figures press against, interrupt, or extend beyond them, the paintings expose those boundaries as authored rather than inevitable. They ask whether inherited rules still govern our expectations, how deeply we have internalized them, and what conformity demands of the people expected to follow them.

Visual code-switching becomes both a strategy and a site of refusal. What happens when a subject speaks the canon’s visual language fluently—and what happens when that language is altered? Fluency does not equal allegiance. By revising the language itself, the series makes room for dignity, authority, and respect on the subjects’ own terms.

02

Untethered

The Untethered series examines connection—and the performance of it. Within Black vernacular, to be “plugged” or “tapped in” is to have access: to community, opportunity, information, protection, or belonging. Yet the headphones hang loose, visibly connected to nothing, creating the appearance of access while the figure remains disconnected—socially, personally, financially, geographically, or spiritually.

Here, interiority means the fullness of one’s inner life: reflection, contemplation, vulnerability, and the mind thinking about its own thinking. The figures withdraw from society’s noise, but the silence is not empty. It becomes a space for meditation, existential questioning, and reconnection to a private spiritual frequency.

Untethered asks what anchors us, what connects us, and what happens when those connections are absent. It makes visible the quiet labor of becoming—who we are, who we refuse to be shaped by, and the frequencies we choose to inhabit when we reclaim ourselves.

About the artist

Eileen
Lacy

Eileen Lacy, artist
Eileen Lacy · Artist & educator

“My work begins where history meets memory: in the authority of the canon, the truth of historical photography, and the yellowed family photographs our keepers preserve—softened by time, yet crystal clear within us. I paint our shared nostalgia: aunties and uncles at card parties and barbecues, children drinking from the hose and racing home before the streetlights, and the ways fashion, spirituality, gender, and sexuality shape how we see and remember ourselves.”

Eileen Lacy—known simply as Lacy—is a Chicago-area painter and educator whose work is grounded in Black dignity, spirituality, interiority, ancestral presence, and the gaze. Through oil portraiture, she investigates how cultural codes and historical portrait traditions shape Black identity—and how portraiture can reclaim agency.

Lacy holds a BFA in Art Education from the University of Illinois Chicago and an MS in Education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Science and Industry, South Shore Cultural Center, Gallery 400, and other Chicago-area institutions.

Selected exhibitions

Available works · Commissions · Exhibitions

Bring the work
into the room.

For acquisitions, commissions, exhibition opportunities, or studio inquiries, contact Lacy directly.

lacy@eileenlacy.com Instagram @luving_lacy Join the Collectors List