Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
RESUME
Khaila Batts is a multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates the intersections of memory, identity, and perception through a fusion of digital collage, painting, and installation. Rooted in her experience as a Black American, Batts constructs layered, surreal compositions that interrogate how race, trauma, and technology shape visual culture. Her practice often involves inverting skin tones to challenge dominant racial frameworks, inviting viewers to use their phone’s screen inversion settings to reveal hidden imagery—transforming passive observation into active engagement.
Batts holds an M.F.A. in Studio Arts and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from The City College of New York. Her work has been exhibited at Westbeth Gallery, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, and Amos Eno Gallery, and has been featured in Stepmom Magazine and White Columns Curated Artist Registry. She is a 2025 Wassaic Project Winter Resident and was selected for residencies at MASS MoCA, A Studio in the Woods, and Vermont Studio Center, among others.
Blending analog and digital techniques, Batts creates large-scale works that are at once emotionally intimate and politically charged. Her current projects explore how discarded materials, family archives, and color inversion operate as tools for reframing Blackness and reclaiming agency within distorted systems of representation.