Cameron Spratley is an American painter whose work addresses the enduring violences of racism and its entanglement with visual culture. Through layered compositions built from acrylic, oil, airbrush, marker, and collage, he creates dense surfaces that reflect the psychic toll of anti-Blackness in the United States. Figures are fragmented or obscured, slogans cut across faces, and symbols accumulate without resolution. Spratley draws from mass media, subcultural aesthetics, and lived experience, channeling their forms into paintings that register resistance and exhaustion.

Language plays a central role in Spratley’s practice. Phrases—sometimes coded, sometimes blunt—are embedded into the canvas as interruptions, provocations, or veiled accusations. They operate alongside fractured imagery to create a field where recognition is partial and meaning is unstable. Each canvas holds multiple registers at once: rage, mourning, survival, and refusal. Through this approach, he builds a visual language attuned to the conditions of Black life in a country shaped by fear and spectacle.

Cameron Spratley (American, b. 1994 in Manassas, VA) lives and works in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions of Spratley’s work include a forthcoming exhibition with Von Ammon Co. in Washington D.C., Violets and Daisies (2023) at M. LeBlanc in Chicago, American Portraiture (2023) at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles, 1364 (with Leni Sinclair) (2022) in Detroit, Pressure (with Jason S. Wright) (2022) at Material Room in Richmond, In the Air Tonight (2021) at James Fuentes in New York, Caged Bird Songs (2021) at James Fuentes (Online) in New York, and 730 (2020) at M. LeBlanc in Chicago. Spratley’s work has also been included in recent group exhibitions, LIFE (curated by Arnold J. Kemp) (2025) at Artist's Space in New York, Miniotics (2025) at Weatherproof in Chicago, A Prologue for Chicago (2024) at de boer in Los Angeles, Group Exhibition (2024) at M. LeBlanc in Chicago, Offices and Honky Tonks (2023) at Nightclub in Minneapolis, Drunk vs. Stoned 3 (2023) at The Ranch in Montauk, The Californian Subject (2023) at Temple Projects in Los Angeles, Nice Work Forever (2023) at Sulk Chicago, Homotopy Type Theory (2023) at Centralbanken in Oslo, SKIN+MASKS (2022) at Kavi Gupta in Chicago, A Healthy Dose of Nihilism (2022) at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Columbus, OH, Made to be Broken (2022) at P.P.O.W. in New York, Songs of Fire (2022) at Kranzberg Arts Foundation in St. Louis, and Notes on Entropy (2020) at Arcadia Missa in London. In 2021, Spratley collaborated with filmmaker Jordan Peele and his firm Monkeypaw Productions on the remake of Candyman, set in Chicago. Spratley attended the Yale University at Norfolk residency in 2015, obtained his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016, and completed his MFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2021.

CURRICULUM VITAE

EXHIBITIONS

April 13th - May 24th, 2024
Group Exhibition

September 9th - October 28th 2023
Violets and Daisies

October 18th to November 20th 2021
MOLOCH

June 13th - August 15th 2020
730

PUBLICATIONS

Cameron Spratley | Necropolis | Monograph

Cameron Spratley & Max Volkman
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony Korine Artist Book