Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies.
Haynes holds a BA in Film from Temple University, a CFA in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College.
Haynes' work focuses heavily on the human body. She believes the moles, wrinkles, stretch marks, veins and scars on the surface of our bodies are landmarks of our journey through our lives. Her themes often include trauma, healing, aging, illness, and mortality. Her work pushes the social conventions of beauty and femininity as well as gender and sexuality.<sup>1</sup>
Haynes' most well-known work is the Torsos series, which portrays the nude torso complete with wrinkles and blemishes, in the opposite style from a glamour portrait. The absence of a face compels the viewer to detect character and personality from these less-familiar indicators.<sup>2</sup> àThis project initially began with a self-portrait of her own torso in order to confront her own discomfort with her body. After feeling empowered by the portrait, Haynes began doing more of these portraits for friends and soon for others. She explains: "I am interested in the many ways the body changes throughout a lifetime, and in the ways in which we create and change our bodies." Haynes, in conversation with artist Loie Hollowell in BOMB Magazine,<sup>[</sup><sup>[https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2025/09/15/clarity-haynes-and-loie-hollowell/ 3] ]</sup> mentions a scar that was on the belly of one of her models. The scar, which was in the shape of a flower, was ultimately included in the painting and the painting became one of Haynes' favorites. Within Haynesâ work lies the freedom and queer possibility of enjoying the nuanced parts of the body that society deems taboo. Haynes keeps records and pictures of each sitter in handmade books for the project full of the people she painted to help heal just like she had. In the New York Times article, A New Way of Looking at the Nude, <sup>[</sup><sup>[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/t-magazine/contemporary-nude-art.html 4] ]</sup>Julia Halperin wrote, âÂÂFor Haynes, the act of painting the nude is, more than anything else, an antidote to shame.âÂÂ
A New Yorker review<sup>[</sup><sup>[https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/art/clarity-haynes 5] ]</sup> by Johanna Fateman states, âÂÂHaynes explores the possibilities of feminist figuration in cropped compositions whose subjects are frankly depicted, in frontal poses, with their scars, stretch marks, and sagging flesh. Their tattoos and jewelry assume a talismanic significance, which continues in a companion seriesâÂÂits genre might be called âÂÂqueer trompe-lâÂÂoeilâÂÂâÂÂportraying collage like shrines.â Within her altars, Haynes honors various queer symbols and ephemera, allowing the viewer to appreciate their evolution over time. This preservation of LGBT history creates a visual archive.
In 2021 Haynes had a solo exhibition, Collective Transmission <sup>[</sup><sup>[https://thealdrich.org/exhibitions/clarity-haynes-collective-transmission 6] ]</sup>, at the Aldrich Museum which focused on her altars. Within that exhibition was the painting Birth Altar (2020-21) which led Haynes into a body of work entirely of paintings about births - her Crowning series, which started in 2020. Haynes is interested in fragmenting the body as a strategy for examination. It allows for an examination and disorienting of the body through a queer lens, outside of acceptable social norms.
Haynesâ first exhibition of crowning work was at NADA Foreland in 2021. In 2024, her exhibition at New Discretions in New York was focused on the Crowning series.<sup>[</sup><sup>[https://www.vulture.com/article/best-new-york-art-shows-2024.html 7] ]</sup>
Haynes has had solo exhibitions at Brandeis University's Kniznick Gallery, Payne Gallery at Moravian College, Stout Projects, Bogigian Gallery at Wilson College, and Artists' House Gallery. Her work was included in The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today at the National Portrait Gallery, which traveled to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Ackland Art Museum and the Art Museum of South Texas. She has participated in many group exhibitions, including at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Rutgers University's Paul Robeson Galleries, Invisible-Exports Gallery, Mana Contemporary, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.
Haynes has received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Brooklyn Arts Council/New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Community Regrant Award, a Leeway Foundation Window of Opportunity Grant, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant. Haynes' work has been discussed in many publications, including the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Juxtapoz Magazine, Beautiful Decay Magazine, and the Huffington Post, among others. Her work is included in The Body: Social and Cultural Dissections, Routledge, and Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture, Routledge. Her work was featured in Sinister Wisdom's July 2016 issue, Variations. Haynes' work is in the collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, and the Rena Rowan Breast Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. Her work is included in the Brooklyn Museum's Feminist Art Base, a digital archive.
Haynes' work is frequently censored on social media. She has written about her experience with censorship, and chaired a panel on the subject at the College Art Association Conference in 2019.