Contemporary Art
Explore stunning acrylic paintings and murals
Laci McCrea Art
Artist Bio
Laci McCrea has been making marks on walls since she could hold a crayon. Today, she just uses bigger walls and top quality paint.
Originally from Salt Lake City, McCrea is a contemporary painter and muralist whose work moves between expressive realism, figurative painting and large-scale public art. Her subjects range from wildlife and the natural world to intimate studies of human gesture, touch and connection. Across these seemingly different bodies of work runs a common thread: an interest in presence, emotion and the fleeting moments that make a subject feel vividly alive.
McCrea’s distinctive painterly style is built from an unusually spare palette. Working primarily in acrylic, she creates the expansive range of colors in her paintings from just four: blue, magenta, yellow and white. The constraint is intentional. Through layers of mixed color, expressive brushwork and close observation, she creates work that is recognizable without feeling photographic—realism interpreted through the eye and hand of the painter.
Her path to a life in art has been as individual as the work itself. McCrea studied art through family members and public school before ultimately earning a BA in Business Management through Ashford University in 2013, a degree she pursued in part to better understand how to build a sustainable life around her art. Her career has included exhibitions, artist residencies, commissioned paintings and public artwork across the country, including an artist residency with Boise’s 8th Street Marketplace. Today, based in Savannah, Georgia, she continues to work across scales—from intimate paintings on canvas to murals that transform entire walls and public spaces.
At the center of McCrea’s practice is curiosity: about color, about people, about other living creatures, and about what happens when art escapes the expected places we put it. Whether the subject is a face looking back from a canvas, two bodies caught in an intimate moment, or a larger-than-life animal stretching across a city wall, her work invites the viewer to stop, look longer, and encounter something familiar in an unexpected way.
Self-Serve Art Gallery
Five years ago, inspired in part by the accessibility and spontaneity of the New Orleans art scene, Laci McCrea put an unconventional idea to the test: What if an art gallery didn’t need a gallery?
She transformed a trailer into a brightly painted, mobile Self-Serve Art Gallery and began taking it wherever she went. The doors stay open. Visitors are invited to step inside, browse original paintings and, if something speaks to them, scan a QR code, purchase it and take it home. There is no salesperson and no one standing guard.
The experiment relies on something surprisingly simple: trust.
In four years of operating on the honor system, McCrea says only one painting has ever gone unaccounted for.
Part gallery, part public-art project and part social experiment, the trailer reflects McCrea’s larger philosophy about art: it doesn’t have to wait behind a gallery door for someone to discover it. Art can travel. It can appear unexpectedly. It can invite curiosity. And sometimes, given the opportunity, people prove considerably more trustworthy than we expect them to be.
Since arriving in Savannah, McCrea’s colorful mobile gallery has become a roaming point of curiosity—appearing around the city, inviting people inside and introducing original art to people who may never have planned to visit a gallery at all.