Skully Gustafson

Born 1989 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
Lives and works in Hillsborough, North Carolina, USA.

Skully Gustafson is a multi-disciplinary artist who paints, sculpts, creates installations, writes music, and performs. The work is informed by her identity as a queer, trans femme and explores the complexities of sexuality and gender through her practice. Skully believes art is about freedom and the constant desire to play with the unknown. She cultivates spontaneity, improvisation and the use of chance as method, believing in the power of art to heal and transform.

The work appears joyful and boundaryless across various mediums, employing expressive colour and free-form mark making. Skully's artistic world is full of magic and mystery, open to endless interpretation and brimming with details inviting the viewer to step into her technicolour world.

Her paintings create realities through obsessive layering and bold colour by playing with abstracted human and animal figures, loosely recognisable spaces, and emotional mayhem. The emotional rawness mixed with a flattened pictorial plane creates a psychological depth that transcends the distinction between subject and viewer. The works refuse a single interpretation, existing in a non-rational, constantly evolving and elusive space.

While leaning toward joy and pleasure, the works also implicate the sufferings of all beings, often infused with a chaotic sense of humour. In addition, the use of esoteric and otherworldly imagery is a way of engaging with the distressing nature of the state of the world. ​

Skully grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin, before moving to Milwaukee to study at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and attending a semester at the New York Studio Residency Program through the School of Visual Arts in 2011. She earned her BFA in Integrated Studio Arts from MIAD in 2012. She's been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad and completed a two-year residency at RedLine MKE in 2015. She also operated a DIY space from her store-front studio, Four Wheels, which hosted exhibitions, performance art, and music shows for six years. She moved to North Carolina in the summer of 2020.

In the summer of 2021, she had a solo exhibition called “Pollinating” at Slug Space in Attic 506, an art space in Chapel Hill on Franklin Street. Shortly after the show, Skully and her partner, Olivia Gone, were asked to take over curating the gallery space. They kept the name along with its original mission of exhibiting BIPOC and queer artists in North Carolina and beyond. In May 2022, Skully completed a one-month residency at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC. Her final project resulted in a multi-media installation called “Sylvia’s Spaceship”.