Rahm Bowen creates portraits that collapse time where Blackness is rendered as ancient, futuristic, and ever-present.
Working as a multidisciplinary, Bowen builds luminous worlds through color, texture, and light, treating these elements as forces rather than embellishments. Their figures emerge as vessels of multiplicity, holding layered narratives that feel both intimate and mythic.
Drawing from mythology, spirituality, and reverence, Bowen’s work resists linear timelines. Past, present, and future coexist within a single frame, forming visual lineages rather than singular identities. Figures and natural elements move in conversation with one another, blurring the line between the human and the natural.
By centering the body as both subject and symbol, Bowen explores the space between the earthly and the spiritual. The portraits function as living altars celebrating Black identity in its fullness across the African diaspora while opening space for new possibilities.
A Syracuse native and Parsons School of Design alum, Bowen is based in Brooklyn, New York, and was named Forbes 30 under 30.
Portrait by Jiraurd Key
Working as a multidisciplinary, Bowen builds luminous worlds through color, texture, and light, treating these elements as forces rather than embellishments. Their figures emerge as vessels of multiplicity, holding layered narratives that feel both intimate and mythic.
Drawing from mythology, spirituality, and reverence, Bowen’s work resists linear timelines. Past, present, and future coexist within a single frame, forming visual lineages rather than singular identities. Figures and natural elements move in conversation with one another, blurring the line between the human and the natural.
By centering the body as both subject and symbol, Bowen explores the space between the earthly and the spiritual. The portraits function as living altars celebrating Black identity in its fullness across the African diaspora while opening space for new possibilities.
A Syracuse native and Parsons School of Design alum, Bowen is based in Brooklyn, New York, and was named Forbes 30 under 30.
Portrait by Jiraurd Key