Tia Keobounpheng (b. 1977 Virginia, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist of Finnish and Sámi descent based in Minneapolis, MN. Her abstract geometric paintings - tapestries of threads over drawings on wood - break apart traditional craft methods as a means of speaking to inherited generational patterns. Tia 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 regionally and nationally, including solo exhibition Revealing Threads at the Minneapolis Institute of Art/Mia (2023), Common Threads at Apple Park in Cupertino, CA (2024), Nordic Echoes at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, NY (2025), and Chicago EXPO 2025 with Weinstein Hammons Gallery. Her work is part of the collections of Mia, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN.

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 “Geo means earth, so geometry is just measuring the earth.” These words, heard attending my son’s 4th grade math lesson during pandemic distance learning, changed my worldview and reminded me that underneath rigid linear laws, an entire foundation of forgotten circular-consciousness exists. My exploration into geometry coincided with learning that in my known familial histories there was suppressed Sámi lineage in my great-grandmother’s line, thereby completely changing the narrative of our Finnish heritage. 

Abstraction allows me to face my own entanglement with inherited patterns by placing them into an ancestral context that circles the past, present, and future together. My practice of creating modern paintings – tapestries of threads over drawings on wood  – draws on the culmination of my skills in painting, drawing, color-theory, weaving, architecture, design, metalworking, sculpture and traditional handcraft. 

I work entirely by hand, by choice.  I am physically building auric warp-fields by  channeling multiple patterns, threads, and colors that appear to shift and vibrate. Mapping geometries in pencil on wood, drilling holes, applying colored-pencil, and moving needle and thread back and forth, is a somatic method of recalibrating emotional, cognitive, and visceral ways of knowing. This practice of “unweaving” is a simultaneous upheaval of horizontal weft and exposing of vertical warp – like removing learned behaviors in order to see the threads of time and lineage that shaped them. 

Geometry is a visual language that speaks universally and stretches the world through an expansive, interconnected lens. Unlike imposed orders that require conformity, geometry is tolerant and reflective of the natural order, and a cipher for differentiating colonial from indigenous ways of thinking and knowing.  I use geometry to express epigenetic consciousness awakened by my ongoing reconnection and inquiry into Sámi lineage, land, and living relatives in Swedish-Sápmi – connections that were concealed almost to the point of erasure.

PORTRAIT BY: Wolfskull Creative