Biography: Who is Courtney Minor?

Courtney Minor is Multidisciplinary artist specializing in collage, photography/film, assemblage and product design. Her work is rooted in her emotions, psychology/mental health, memories, travels, and love of science fiction.

Minor was born in Houston, Texas, USA, in 1984 and is a self taught Collagist at her core. Though taught the basics of art in elementary school & winning art awards at her private school, Minor took the long way around to becoming a professional artist. Early art mentor Kelvin Coney encouraged her to pursue her art, convincing her to do her first collage commission as an adult in 2007. However, between grammar school and that one off commission, Minor created no artworks until the winter of 2018. Working in her corporate job, she was unhappy and looked for an outlet for her creative musings. In an attempt to get away from it all, she flew to Vietnam for a break and began photographing herself, the locals and her surroundings. There she got her first idea to adhere her photographs to a canvas… to create a more thoughtful collage than what she had done prior. Upon returning to the USA, she delved head first into creating her collage works, first by printing her photographs to canvas paper then pasting images at varied scales onto the base canvas photograph. She began exploring incorporating other mediums such as acrylic paint and found object into her initial works. Her friends and mentor encouraged her to begin showing her work in the summer of 2019. Minor went on to an Instagram account, show her work Kell’s the Warrior Part 2 at Hang Night at the Heath Gallery in Harlem, NYC and allow a friend share her work with the art curator of Red Rooster Harlem. After that, as the saying goes, the rest was history.

By the winter of 2019, Courtney Minor began exhibiting at a varied of shows, fairs and galleries. She landed a brand partnership with Gap where she along with two other artist designed Gap’s 2020 Black History Month shirt and was one of the faces of the month long advertising campaign. Minor began exhibiting at both The Other Art Fair Brooklyn, where she won Director’s Pick of the fair and sold out many of her works, and at The Clio Art Fair, during which COVID hit the world. During the events of 2020, Minor was greatly affected by the social unrest affecting the world and her own personal struggles. It prompted her to  produce one of her most powerful works “Worry. Anger. Systemic. Pandemic.” that was acquired quickly for a private collection. This work was her first foray into graffiti as an element in her art. During the 2.5 year global shut down, Minor continued to create as a form of art therapy and showed via various online art exhibitions sponsored by art galleries, fairs and magazines.

During 2021, Courtney Minor experienced immense lost with the death of not only her father but three close family friends and several lost due to contracting COVID. To process her grief, Minor created her Blue Series, a series of analog collage portraits paying tribute to those lost and those living with the memory of loved ones taken too soon. It took all of 2022 for her to complete these works as well as grieve. It culminated in her created a site specific installation in her studio in Houston, TX and a public exhibition of her works at a gallery space in January 2023.

Minor now has returned full force to her art practice including winning art residencies in NYC during the summer of 2023 as well as international residencies in Mexico and Greece through 2024. Courtney Minor’s work can be viewed & purchased on her website or at her partner galleries: Singulart Gallery in Paris, Saatchi Art, 33 Contemporary and Kente Royal Gallery.

Self taught artist. Studied under Ulysses Grant