Miya Bailey’s ‘Today and Tomorrow’ conveys optimism and nostalgia through mixed-media paintings

The 40 paintings comprising Today and Tomorrow, Miya Bailey’s 10th solo exhibition opening September 11 at Old Rabbit Gallery, tells what the artist calls a “broken story,” but that story is anything but melancholic.

Bringing together fragmented, fractured and distorted imagery from African masks, cartoon characters, designer luxury goods, gold leaf, strips of leather and bits of printed text, the works of Today and Tomorrow are layered with meaning. They unearth flashes of the past and trigger nostalgia while celebrating the present and leaning toward the future.

The artist Yves Klein once said he “developed a taste for painting with the baby bottle.” Bailey’s artistic journey seems to have developed similarly. Hailing from Asheville, North Carolina, Bailey’s creative curiosity and talent emerged at an unusually young age. By age 11, he was selling his own art. In 1994, he settled in Atlanta, studying graphic arts at the former Art Institute of Atlanta. In 2007, he opened the legendary City of Ink tattoo shop in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood, pursuing in tandem a career as a highly successful tattooer and an accomplished fine artist. The two pursuits, he says, “tell one story.”

The mixed media images of Today and Tomorrow have a surprising lightness. Bailey’s optimism is evidenced both by the title of the exhibition and by his bold color palette.

“There’s something about yellow that is really calling me right now,” Bailey said. “It’s showing up in the work through, like, bursts of sunlight coming through stuff.”

The unexpected flash of light is about seeing beyond trauma and emotional difficulty. “It’s like seeing something beautiful on the other side of all this madness and what we call chaos,” he said. “No matter what adventures and hardships we get, we always got the sunlight. So this show is a focus on the now.”

The lightness of the work perhaps owes a little something to Bailey’s emergence from the difficulties that mounted against his tattoo shop. In 2025, a decades-old zoning ordinance forced the shop to close its doors. The fight to reopen was long and hard, but the brightness of Today and Tomorrow suggest perhaps Bailey is letting go of the trauma of that disruption in a celebration of the present and anticipation of a brighter future.

“I want to experiment and give people a taste of what I want to evolve into,” he said.

Coupled with the exploration of light is Bailey’s work is his experimentation with textures and abstraction to evoke emotion. “The older you get, the more it becomes abstract,” he said. “The more you use different textures … I’m trying to show emotions without showing figures — process emotions with an organic shape.”

The materials and found imagery in Bailey’s works also carry personal and cultural significance. He points to the strips of leather that run like a motif throughout the works.

“I love the color of this leather,” he said. “I want the work to feel like ‘straight up.’ I’m from North Carolina. I want the art to feel Black, and I feel like this leather captures the skin tone of my people.”

The works also intentionally capture a folk-art vibe as Bailey distorts and transfigures the found imagery and common, day-to-day materials that layer the pieces.

“I abstract it, break it up, distort it, reimagine it if you look closely,” he said. “You can also see that I applied Louis Vuitton … using the paper’s color as a substitute for the color I would paint … The color reminds me of red clay — that era of playing in the mud back home.”

That touch of nostalgia in the work is a deliberate deployment, a way to elicit emotional connection.

“You always can get someone with nostalgia,” he said. “Nostalgia is a secret weapon, an emotional secret weapon. If you insert a little nostalgia into the work, somebody’s gonna be able to relate to it.” 

“I want people to look,” Bailey added. “I want them to go into a world [in my work]. I want them to ask questions about why this figure looks like this or like that … It’s tapping into ancestry, but it’s also tapping into the future. It’s like a homage to the past, but it’s not the past. It’s today — and further.”

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Robert Stalker is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who writes about modern and contemporary art.