In the Studio with Contemporary Expressionist Ransome
By inside + out | September 25, 2025
In his upcoming exhibition A House Is Not a Home, Hudson Valley–based artist Ransome continues his lyrical exploration of memory, migration, and belonging. Drawing from his African American lineage, his vibrant mixed-media art is rich in symbolism and story, paying homage to Southern sharecroppers and their descendants who made the journey north during the Great Migration and beyond. While his pictorial narratives are deeply personal, the portraits he portrays, along with his use of quilting patterns, fragments of text, and everyday objects, convey universal themes of belonging and resilience.
As Ransome himself affirms, “The history of my family is the history of Black Americans, which is the history of all of North America.” Through his beautiful work and the collective story he tells, he therefore traces his own family’s history of migration, separation, and resilience. In bold color and layered surfaces, as well as the creation of some three-dimensional oeuvres, he evokes presence and absence, a nostalgia and celebration threaded with complexity and loss. In each, acrylic paint merges with found and made textures and objects, echoing a legacy of resourcefulness—of making something out of nothing– something that holds potency, beauty, alchemy, and resilience.