Ayanna Aneesa Rafia’s paintings explore the layered nature of built environments as sites of memory, erasure, and accumulation. Working through surface, structure, and repetition, her compositions consider how space holds traces of past presence while continuously being rewritten. Architectural forms appear not as fixed or inert, but as living records—marked by use, altered by time, and shaped by the bodies that move through them.

Her practice engages architecture as both subject and metaphor, tracing the emotional and psychological dimensions embedded within physical space. Through processes that emphasize layering and material accumulation, the work reflects a sensitivity to what is revealed and concealed over time. These surfaces operate as palimpsests—bearing witness to histories that persist even as they are obscured, overwritten, or transformed.

Grounded in observation and spatial awareness, Rafia’s paintings examine the relationship between architecture, memory, and the body. Her work moves between interior and exterior, presence and absence, permanence and decay, proposing space as something felt as much as it is seen.

Ayanna Aneesa Rafia (b. 2002, Southfield, MI) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and studied Interior Architecture at DIS Copenhagen. Rafia is the inaugural resident of the NY Developer Residency in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited at Stamps Gallery (2024), Ann Arbor, MI and Gallery DAAS (2024).