she`s so skirt!

Kiersten N. Williams paints her heart.

For Kiersten N. Williams, it starts with words and phrases, and pours out into bold, vibrant, unmistakably female paintings and multimedia works. “Young ladies should be seen and not heard” was an early theme; “I hated that [idea],” Kiersten says now. The words WASH—“washing out our issues”—and THIRSTY, or “needing more out of life”—also show up over and over. No wonder. She graduated from Overton High, majoring in Studio Art. But everyone said she ought to get a business degree, which she did, from the University of Memphis. Maybe her latest work, a series about the games people play, explains her next steps, leaving the corporate world behind. “In hopscotch, you go outside the lines, and if you’re an artist, you go outside the lines of popularity. People write you off as weird or eccentric,” she says. “I love being weird.”