Tia Keobounpheng (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice weaves together geometry, abstraction, color, and fiber. Informed by her Finnish and Sámi heritage, her work navigates themes of identity and belonging.
Keobounpheng’s intricately layered compositions emerge through a meticulous process of measuring, drafting, drilling, coloring, and threading. Each piece becomes a tactile meditation on memory, both ancestral and cellular, while also being rooted in a long tradition of women’s embodied labor. Keobounpheng develops a multi-layered visual language grounded in geometry, not as a rigid system, but as a fluid, symbolic framework. Recurring motifs such as circles, curves, and radiating lines evoke natural rhythms and cycles, offering perspectives on transformation and continuity.
At its core, Keobounpheng’s practice offers a richly textured inquiry into ancestral inheritance. Through abstract form, she embeds processes of reconciliation and hopeful imagination, creating work that invites viewers to engage with the layered complexities of selfhood, memory, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.
Keobounpheng has received numerous grants from the MN State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation through the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the American Scandinavian Foundation. She has exhibited nationally, including a solo exhibition, Revealing Threads, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2023), Common Threads at Apple Park in Cupertino, CA (2024), Nordic Echoes at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, NY (2025). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, and University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN.
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“In weaving, long threads of warp are wound onto a loom. Single strands of weft weave over and under the warp to create a structural fabric. In my work, I think of warp as the threads of time and lineage and the weft as my learned behaviors. I build fields of dense parallel (warp) threads over colorful drawings on wood panels, omitting the weft. Metaphorically, I remove my behaviors in order to see the ancestral threads that shaped them. The energy that emerges when all of the threads are in place feels like wisdom bestowed by my grandmothers who I never knew, or pre-colonial matriarchy of my foremothers of the Arctic Circle. While I dismantle narratives in my mind and process somatically while working by hand, I also bring complex, vibrational visions to life. I learn from the threads like one might learn from elders. Geometry becomes the cipher for a transformed worldview, a universal language that defines the abstract world where I am free to unlearn dominance and imagine reciprocity. My practice moves in tandem with my ongoing reconnection to Sámi land, relatives, language, and culture. With responsibility, I try to honor my ancestors and their indigenous perspectives, however broad or specific, by expressing a relationship with the natural world that was nearly erased from my consciousness along with them.”
Learn more about Tia’s cross-disciplinary work: tiakeoart.com & silvercocoon.com
Photograph still from video by Calvin Brue