Tia Keobounpheng (American, born 1977) is a Minneapolis-based multimedia artist drawing from historic, ancestral, and epigenetic influences. Her art reflects a journey of personal reconciliation with her Finnish and Sámi heritage. Keobounpheng holds a BA in Architecture from the University of Minnesota. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally including recent solo exhibitions Revealing Threads, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2023), Muitit at The Armory Show in Manhattan, NY (2025), and Gullat at Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, MN (2026); a large-scale permanent commission for the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN (2024); and group exhibitions Common Thread at Apple Park in Cupertino, CA (2024), and Nordic Echoes at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, NY (2025) which travels to museums in six Upper Midwest States through 2027. Keobounpheng is a Summer 2026 MacDowell Fellow, was selected for residencies at Kunstkvarteret Lofoten, Norway (2026), and Kakslauttanen, Finland (2023), and will be artist-in-residence at Tandem Press in Madison, WI in 2027. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Thrivent, General Mills, Tweed Art Museum, 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.” - Tia Keobounpheng

Learn more about Tia’s cross-disciplinary work: tiakeoart.com & silvercocoon.com‍ ‍

Photograph still from video by Calvin Brue