2026 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FINALIST
THURSDAY BONEY
Image courtesy of the artist.
Thursday Greta Boney is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, music, and performance. She began painting after leaving for college, when rejection from her familial community led to her exile as a Black trans woman living unhoused in Raleigh, North Carolina.
What started as a means of survival became a continuous artistic practice: selling paintings to afford food and a place to sleep. Her combined experience continues to shape work rooted in resilience, transformation, the intricacies of identity, belonging, and survival. Across visual art, music and performance, Thursday Greta Boney creates from lived and historical contexts, using each medium to document, witness, resist, reclaim agency, and imagine new possibilities.
She has exhibited and performed across the US and Canada.
Fayetville (2023)
Self Portrait (2023)
Eat Yourself (2022)
Aiyanna Stanley Jones (2026)
American S(heroes) (2024)
My Real Art (2024)