Arianna Barley (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Huntsville, Alabama. She earned her BA in Painting from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2018, and is currently a third year Masters of Fine Arts candidate at Arizona State University. In April of 2025, Step Gallery (Phoenix, Arizona) will host her solo thesis exhibition focusing on her research and site engagements with Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama. Arianna received Arizona State University’s Nathan Cummings Graduate Travel Grant (2024) and was nominated and selected as an ASU Graduate College Enrichment Fellow (2022-2024). Recent group exhibitions include Becoming-with at Step Gallery (2023), body/architecture/landscape at Cosanti Originals (2023) and All the Moves at ASU’s Humanities Institute (2024).

Artist Statement

Rooted in the material culture and histories of the Black Southern United States, I create mixed-media textile works and installations that explore and question ways of knowing. Through my practice, I utilize things passed down as tools for understanding and examining our relationship to ancestral and shared histories. Historically-imbued materials, oral histories, and archival photographs and documents are placed in conversation with fibers and textile processes as methods of examination and meaning-making with the past. Working simultaneously within and outside of institutional modes of historical engagement, my studio practice is guided by considerations of authorship and distinctions and interdependencies between “official” and speculative ways of knowing. The work begins with care and criticality, centers the archival encounter as grounds for understanding and imagining, and strives to remain accountable to our shared histories as well as our collective futures.