Lily Raines 


2025  2024  2023  Installation  About

Bio:

Lily Raines (b. Bellevue, Washington, 2003), uses representational oil painting to
generate dialogues on queer sexuality and mortality. In 2025 she received BFA
from the Maryland Institute College of Arts in Painting. Her work has been
exhibited in Baltimore, Washington D.C., Charlotte, and Seattle, including a
solo show at the Gateway Gallery in Baltimore.

Statement:


Informed by my transgender identity and bodily alienation, my work seeks
representation through a sublimation of self by forming relationships with objects, narratives, and icons. Through a reappropriation of Warholian figuration, my
paintings investigate intricacies of queer identity. Examining the entanglements of anatomy, eroticism, and death, my works exhume political imagery of the twentieth
century to create iconographic counter-narratives. Drawing from both queer and
fascist archives, figures are materialized in the body of oil paint, oscillating between
states of presence and erasure.

Contact:


email: lilyraines.artist@gmail.com
instagram: @handsome__fairy
Download CV



Solo Exhibitions:


2024     Touch; Kiss; Quiet                                 - Gateway Gallery at MICA, Baltimore, MD


Select Group Exhibitions:


2025     Aporia: On Contradiction                   - Main 360 Gallery at MICA, Baltimore, MD
              Hopscotch                                             - Flying House Arts Collective, Baltimore, MD
              What Are You Doing in My Dream? - Goodyear Arts, Charlotte, NC


2024     Ebb & Flow                                            - the Lazarus Center at MICA, Baltimore, MD
               the EXPERIMENT                                - NightOwl Gallery, Baltimore, MD
               Growing Pains                                      - Touchstone Gallery, Washington DC
               it feels right to me                                - Middendorf Gallery, Baltimore, MD


2023     Blink, And You’ll Miss It                       - France-Merrick Foundation Gallery, Baltimore, MD
               Undergraduate Juried Exhibition     - Decker Gallery, Baltimore, MD - Juried by
                                                                                   Michael Benevento and Inés Sanchez de Lozada
               102°                                                         - Main 360 Gallery at MICA, Baltimore, MD 


2022     Personal Directions                             - Leake Studio, MICA Main Building, Baltimore, MD



Publications:


2025     Matt Cosper, “Fragments from The Dreaming” 


Awards:


2025     John Bradley Sutton Overall Achievement Award - Maryland Institute College of Art


2024     Nora and Eugene Leake Scholarship                        - Maryland Institute College of Art
    

2021      Visionary Artist Award                                                  - Maryland Institute College of Art


Education: 


2025     Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting            - Maryland Institute College of Art