Photo by Daniel Stelly, 2023
Artist, Designer, Educator
Elena Gray (b.1998) is currently based in Ferndale, Michigan. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines screen printing, painting, and photography to create works that oscillate between graphic and cinematic visuals. Her work delves into themes of girlhood, memory, gaze, and home in the American Midwest through layered personal photographs that both reference and defy the digital matrix through which they are rendered. She studied printmaking at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI, graduating in 2020. In 2019, she relocated to Detroit, where she began working as an educator at Cranbrook Art Museum. She received her BFA in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2025.
Through split compositions, she fuses feminine figural imagery with colors and textures that evoke light. Her freelance work as a graphic designer and screen printer influenced her work towards saturated color combinations and graphic distortion. She integrates the halftone dots of screen-printed graphics with soft, hand-rendered details, creating a visual tension between the tactile reality of her subjects and the pixelated, digital aesthetic of a screen.
These layered works serve as fragmented snapshots of a personal history—both collected and constructed—exploring the idea of home as a place constantly defined by movement and distance. By blending shifting perspectives and contrasting imagery, she crafts work that invites viewers to reflect on memory, identity, and belonging.
Education
C.V.
September 2023 – May 2025 Master of Fine Art from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI
August 2016 – May 2020 Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids, MI
Selected Group Shows:
May 2026 The Art of Motion, Signal-Return Gallery, Detroit MI
November 2025 Water Show, The Norwest Gallery, Detroit, MI
July 2025 The Detroit Body, Swords and Plowshares, Detroit, MI
June 2025 Spring Happening, Next Step Studio Gallery, Ferndale, MI
April 2025 Graduate Degree Exhibition, Cranbrook Art Museum
Bloomfield Hills, MI
January 2025 Multiples, Forum Gallery, Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI
December 2024 Selling to the Smiths, Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House, Bloomfield Hills, MI
July 2024 Other Selves curator and participant, Flagstar Strand, Pontiac, MI
August 2021 WEVOLVE Fundraising Art Sale, Spotlite, Detroit, MI
November 2019 Annual Juried Group Exhibition, Ann Arbor Art Center, Ann Arbor, MI
September 2019 RAD Women public art project muralist, Grand Rapids, MI
