Join Art+Practice and CAAM for Cool Moms LIVE hosted by Elise Peterson with guest Calida Rawles, whose work is in the exhibition Giving you the best that I got. Cool Moms is a storytelling series and community platform dedicated to amplifying the voices of mothers who prioritize their passions. Led by artist, writer, and host Elise Peterson, it celebrates and shares the unique stories of mothers making a difference in their own lives and communities.
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Elise Peterson treats storytelling as a form of liberation. Working primarily in collage animation, she braids archival footage, cross-generational conversation, and 35mm photographs to open portals of intimacy and memory. Her work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch (Los Angeles) and Eduardo Secci Contemporary (Milan), and is held in the collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul (Quebec). She is also the illustrator of two children’s books—The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gasket と How Mamas Love Their Babies, the first children’s book to depict a sex worker parent. In talks and public programs, Peterson extends her studio practice into live dialogue, inviting audiences to consider repair, lineage, and the politics of care.
Calida Rawles (b. 1976, Wilmington, DE; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is known for her paintings that merge hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Situating her subjects in dynamic spaces, her work employs water as a vital, organic, multifaceted material and as a historically charged space. At times buoyant and ebullient or submerged and mysterious, Black bodies float in exquisitely rendered submarine landscapes of bubbles, ripples, refracted light, and expanses of blue. For Rawles, water signifies physical and spiritual healing, as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. She uses this complicated duality as a means to envision a new space for Black healing, reimagining her subjects beyond racialized tropes and insisting on the strength of humanity.
In her 2019–20 breakthrough body of work, Rawles reimagines the ancient story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was demonized for refusing to submit to him. Rawles expands the Lilith legacy and repositions her from a malevolent spirit at the antithesis of womanhood to a sovereign being who drifts to the surface of uncertain waters, becoming a source of inspired rebellion.
In late 2024, Rawles’ first solo museum exhibition Away with the Tides debuted at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. The show traveled to the Memphis Brooks Art Museum in 2025; from there, it will travel to the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, FL and Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. To create this body of work, Rawles partnered with residents of the Overtown neighborhood in Miami—a historically Black community that has experienced widespread gentrification and displacement. In a series of large-scale portraits, which feature Overtown’s residents immersed in water to varied degrees, Rawles seeks to depict the history of Miami from her subjects’ perspective. Ranging from a 10-month-old baby to senior citizens, these portraits provide representation for those who call Overtown home. At the same time, the works capture a significant generational shift, giving shape to an American experience that is often overlooked.
Rawles’ most recent (2025) paintings explore the human experience, cycles of time, and the transformative nature of identity. As she continues to push the boundaries between hyperrealist figuration and surrealist abstraction, she dives more deeply into color theory, asserting her expertise as a colorist. While watery environments remain constant, detailed faces are absent, moments of suspension take on deeper meaning, and experiments with both color and chiaroscuro define the buoyancy and stagnation that imbibe the bodies that float, sink, and fold into one another. True to form, these choices in color, subjectivity, and rendering of space are connected to broader questions of race, representation, and ethics within both art history and everyday life. Each artwork is based on a photograph or series of photographs that the artist takes herself, and the tertiary colors of her palette signify the liminal space of transformation and existential angst that her figures tread. This alchemical focus on change, disillusionment, and the potential for renewal becomes a blueprint for the future, and reflection thus emerges as a method of both art making and of understanding the sociopolitical conditions that color contemporary life.