Debra Cartwright is an artist interested in depicting the relationship between the Black female body and American medical history. She uses paint and mixed media to explore selfhood and her own positioning as the daughter of a gynecologist. Themes around her work include re-embodiment, myth creation, violence, theft and intimacy. She explores a critical understanding of the past while also proposing an examination of the present American healthcare system.
Cartwright (b. 1988) was born in Annapolis, Maryland. She currently lives and works in New York. She received her BA in Art History from the University of Virginia in 2010 and her MFA in Painting from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2023. Cartwright was a resident at the Wassaic Project in 2024 and at Silver Art in 2025. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Montclair Art Museum AACC Founders Fellowship.
She has held solo exhibitions at Art Basel Miami Beach (2025), Frieze LA (2024), Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey, 2024), and BODE Projects (Berlin, 2023). She has participated in group exhibitions at The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE, 2025); TERN Gallery (Nassau, Bahamas, 2024); Swivel Gallery (New York, 2024); Fridman Gallery (New York, 2024); Untitled Art Fair Miami (2023); New York Academy of Art (2023); Sotheby’s (New York, 2023); Westbeth Gallery (New York, 2023); forMAH Gallery (New York, 2023); Allouche Gallery (New York; 2023), and CFHILL (Stockholm, Sweden, 2020).
Her works are in the collections of the Raclin Murphy Museum at Notre Dame University and the Montclair Art Museum.
Photograph of Debra Cartwright
