Visual artist Lisa Hunt pays attention to what she sees in the world. “I’m constantly observing patterns in my everyday life that find their way into my work,” says Hunt, from her studio in East Orange, New Jersey. “When I started out, I knew I wasn’t going to be a painter,” and, so, she instead combined lines, symbols, and typographic elements on her canvases and screenprints, revealing the infinite possibilities of shape and repetition, with much of her work distinguished by her use of gold leaf. Drawing inspiration from traditional West African textiles and African-American quilt-making, her work explores the spatial and meditative relationships between patterns.

Hunt was a creative little kid whose talent her mother, Asha, recognized and encouraged. “My mom was really good at art,” Hunt recalls, “and she nurtured her children’s artistic interests with everything from making our own Christmas decorations to teaching us how to sew and knit and crochet.”

Though born in Rome, New York, the geographical center of the state, where her father, James, served in the United States Air Force, Hunt grew up mostly in the Colorado suburbs. Already by the age of 12, she admits to being “in love with magazines, even obsessed with them.” Studying the pages of Seventeen and Mademoiselle in her bedroom, she decided that, “Somehow I knew magazines were my future.”

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WRITTEN BY EDWARD MCCANN

This story appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of MILIEU.