Christina Quarles is a contemporary American artist known for works that forge a link between her identity as a queer mixed-race woman with the materiality of paint. They often depict distorted figures tangled in colorful abstract elements, as seen in her work Casually Cruel (2018). The artist builds her compositions through improvised brushstrokes and Adobe Illustrator—which she uses to test out pictorial ideas before setting them down on the canvas. “My relationship to being half black is something I explore in these works, but rather than making paintings of what a racially multiple body looks like,” Quarles explained. “I hope to make paintings that explore what living in a racially multiple...