Artists amplify and anchor communities’ voices. They turn streets into stories and buildings into backdrops. They mirror the ethos of a city back to its people and underline a specific, hyper-local cultural experience.
In Charlotte, the creative landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, with the city’s steady growth reflected in the buzzing energy and ambition of its artists. From established voices to emerging talent, in 2025, our region’s storytellers only continued to reshape and reimagine the status-quo in the most visually arresting ways possible.
This list highlights a small fraction of the painters, sculptors, photographers, and multidisciplinary makers whose work adds depth, color, and character to the city. Discover their art, support their practice, and maybe you’ll even find a particular piece that speaks to you.
Ali Loncar
Mixed media Charlotte NC artist Ali Loncar operates seamlessly across multiple artistic disciplines. Her pieces typically center intricate examinations of the natural world, arraying insects, flowers, and plants in lively compositions. Loncar has contributed to public art displays including an outdoor sculpture for Imaginon, a pollinator awareness mural for Ally Bank, and a float for Charlotte SHOUT! festival.
Allison Chambers
After Wilmington-native Allison Chambers found one calling as a mother of six, she began studying oils and discovered her passion for fine art. With an impasto style, her art represents abstract interpretations of life. She has studied under many different working artists and furthered her passion teaching fine art classes.
Anne Harkness
Anne Harkness has dabbled in many fine art mediums: crayon, pencil, watercolor, and photography. Several years ago, she found her home in oil painting. Today, she is represented by Providence Gallery in Charlotte, and by Vision Gallery in Morehead City.
Araik Minasyan
Araik Minasyan, like many artists, first felt the pull of creative expression when he was a child. He took classes to explore drawing, sculpture, and painting techniques, and then continued his creative education at art school. There, he honed his skills and perfected techniques for a number of media. These days, Minasyan experiments with acrylic painting, sculpture, and watercolor but his primary focus is oil painting on canvas with a palette knife.
André Leon Gray
André Leon Gray specializes in designing ornate installations to create poignant commentary on America’s relationship with race, especially highlighting both the historical and contemporary experiences of black and native communities. His artwork has been featured in the Disney+ Emmy Award-winning anthology series GENIUS: MLK/X.
Barbara Schreiber
Within her seemingly whimsical, narrative-centric paintings of colorful wildlife, Barbara Schreiber explores deeper, more provocative topics. Schreiber personally describes her pieces as a function of catharsis, hoping that her work can inevitably provide others with a sense of hope, and even humor. Her pieces have been displayed in major exhibitions across the United States, including a 2021 residency at the McColl Center.
Diego Alba
Diego Alba is an artist who works with acrylics, watercolors, and pastels. He makes art both digitally and by hand, and says he always hopes to inspire and evoke emotion from his audience. His work is currently displayed in Times Square and the Mint Museum.
Diane Pike
A master in the plein-air painting tradition, Diane Pike’s oeuvre spans between styles of abstract expressionism and natural impressionism in bold color palettes. She recently displayed her work at Awaken Gallery’s show marking their sixth anniversary. In addition to her full-time residence in Longmont, Colorado, Pike regularly holds workshops in Charlotte.
Clarence Heyward
Contemporary Charlotte NC artist Clarence Heyward specializes in oil portrait and collage art encapsulating the Black American experience Particularly, Heyward examines how material historicization impacts modern culture and identity. A repetitive practice in Heyward’s portraits is the portrayal of his subjects with green skin, creating an alternative perception of the Black American identity and centering the deconstruction of myth or stereotype in the conversation of his pieces.
Gordon C. James
James was raised just outside of DC but came to Charlotte at the behest of the McColl Center, which invited him to participate in their residency program. After years of studying and creating, James’ style is both academic and expressive, inspired by John Singer Sargent, Nicholai Fechin, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. James’ fine art portfolio is broken into five sections: origin story, romantic paintings, portraits, figure drawing, and sketchbook.
Ivan Depena
Ivan’s projects build on an artistic journey that has been unfurling since he was no older than seven. Inspired by music and the Graffiti Art movement, he decided to attend a high school dedicated to the arts before earning an undergraduate degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for Architecture. This educational background combined with his life experiences and innate curiosity have resulted in an artist who is fluent in a range of disciplines such as drawing, painting, and sculpture.
Jax Jackson
Owner and curator of Jax Abstracts and Acrylix & Kanvas, gestural painter Jax Jackson is an accomplished abstract artist in Charlotte and beyond. He also dedicates his time to the community by helping individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities create art through collaboration programs.
Jason Clewell
Jason Clewell has been creating since he was young, but after seeing people painting outside at a plein air festival at a winery, he knew that was something he wanted to be a part of. Although still experimenting, he enjoys oil painting the most. After using his talents for business and advertisements, he hopes to begin to create art just for the enjoyment of it again.
Kalin Devone
Wilimington-native Kalin Devone is an oil painter and muralist with a focus on societal influence and social culture. Unique in her technique of using layered short brush strokes, she has been exhibiting her work since 2019, when she had her first solo exhibition (Perpetual). Most recently, her work can be found displayed at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Holly Keogh
In her hazy, vibrant, and often surrealist oil paintings, Holly Keogh captures the continual sense of movement throughout her childhood spent traveling between Charlotte and London. Keogh specifically utilizes discarded family photographs as the basis for her elevated reimaginings of the past, examining the impact of youth upon memory. Currently, Keogh is represented by SOCO Gallery.
Lindsey Jenneman
For the past three years, painter Lindsey Jenneman has been in partnership with Outback Steakhouse to bring her vibrant murals to various of the restaurant’s locations, even internationally. Jenneman’s style prominently features animals portrayed in vivid pops of color accompanied by playful accessorization, each largely dependent upon inspiration from local iconography.
Mari Matamoros
A drawer, painter, and sculptor, Mari Matamoros strives to have variety and create new things every time. After training at The Faux Finish International Company, she opened her own faux finishing company and incorporated her interior design skills. Her goal is to customize each piece of art to its particular client and originality is her main focus.
Marcy Gregg
Primarily working in oil paint, Marcy Gregg creates atmospheric abstract pieces, often alluding to the natural world with a cubist sensibility. After surviving a critical coma, leaving serious detriment to her memory, Marcy also became involved in public speaking and writing. Through these avenues, she discusses the impact of art in the process of reclaiming her life.
Marcia Jones
Marcia Jones is a contemporary artist whose exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center explored the dichotomy of the virgin and the whore through an analogy with Haitian Voodoo motifs and Magic City strip club culture. Her work interrogates cultural symbolism and societal perception through mixed-media installations and paintings.
Nellie Ashford
Nellie Ashford is a self-taught folk artist from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Her mixed-media folk art depicts the experiences of Charlotte’s African-American community from the Jim Crow era to contemporary day in the U.S. South.
Nicholas Stewart
Nicholas received his MFA in painting from Radford University. He now resides in Charlotte, where he has developed his career as a professional artist and lead instructor at Braitman Studio. He finds much of his visual inspiration for his work from cathedrals and stained glass windows.
Regina Calton Burchett
Regina Burchett grew up as the daughter of an artist and writer mother, and began studying many different art styles through university and on her own. The North Carolina-based fine artist considers herself a Carolina sky and cloud artist. She currently leads workshops for painting and working with pastels and charcoal.
Raymond Grubb
Charlotte-based photographer Raymond Grubb is renowned for his masterful use of the century-old platinum-palladium process, which imparts a distinctive warmth and depth to his images. A graduate of Davidson College, Grubb’s work has been featured in esteemed venues such as SOCO Gallery, The Mint Museum, and the Gregg Museum of Art and Design.
Richard Clewell
After gaining 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, Richard Clewell’s current passion is for oil paintings. He particularly enjoys outdoor painting with a modern style. His work can be found at local galleries and at en plein air events.
Susan McAlister
With a multi-media creative vision spanning canvas, paper, and assemblages, Susan McAlister’s impressionistic style immerses the viewer in lush, leafy landscapes. A Davidson College alum, McAlister feels a profound spiritual connection to the aesthetic inspiration offered by the North Carolina wilderness.
Sapana Adhikari, M.D.
Board-certified Emergency Medicine physician Sapana Adhikari, M.D. is a medical illustrator. Her goal in creating illustrations is to simplify complicated medical concepts for the non-medical audience, specifically those with low health literacy. After working in various places across the country, she currently resides and practices in Charlotte with her husband and three children.
Tara Spil
Currently, Charlotte NC artist Tara Spil is in residency at the McColl Center. Having begun her professional career working in nonprofits, today Spil’s abstract paintings involve artistic iterations of similar activism work. Through her implementation of community data within her paintings, especially in regards to her quilting community series and tally series, Spil brings awareness to various inequalities in our city and works as an arbiter for positive reform.
Thomas Thoune
Multimedia artist Tom Thoune, originally from Southern California, relocated to Charlotte in 1981. A self-taught artist, Thoune’s diverse body of work encompasses ceramics, painting, sculpture, and large-scale mosaics. His public art installations, such as the Camden Wall Mosaic Frieze and the Finding New Ground sculptures, are integral to Charlotte’s urban landscape. Thoune’s artistic journey includes a residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art and recognition with a North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship.
Tina Alberni
You may have seen the work of Charlotte NC artist Tina Alberni at Charlotte Douglass International Airport, on Artpop billboards in and around the city, and inside the Charlotte Legacy Union Sky Bridge. She has also exhibited at Sage Salon and Gallery, Ciel Gallery, and the McColl Center. Her work often revolves around repetition, patterning, and geometric shapes and is often inspired by sustainability efforts.
Vivian Coleman
Vivian Coleman is an award-winning visual artist creating contemporary abstract paintings using acrylic and watercolor. She has exhibited widely in the Charlotte area and across the Southeast, with work that emphasizes color, texture, and emotion.
Willie Little
Willie Little is a conceptual, multimedia, installation artist and storyteller, whose work is strongly influenced by traditions of rural North Carolina. His work often addresses issues of race, memory, and regional culture through immersive installations.
