Alake Shilling (born 1993, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting and sculpture who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her practice brings together cartoon aesthetics, ceramics, and pop-inflected figuration to construct a world where humor, tenderness, and unease coexist. Through lush surfaces and playful forms, Shilling creates a cast of creatures and animal characters that embody the human condition in all its imperfections, offering emotional depth beneath their inviting, often cute appearances.

Working across painting and sculpture, Shilling draws from Los Angeles’s visual culture, cartoon imagery, California Funk art, and the irreverent legacy of the Chicago Imagists, completing these references with her own deeply personal visual language. She creates heavily impastoed paintings, ceramics, and large-scale public artworks that blend pop sensibility with uncanny sentiment. Butterflies, bears, bugs, and hybrid beings recur throughout her work, forming a kaleidoscopic, chimeric cast that expands upon late twentieth-century pop.

These figures serve as conduits for emotional complexity, embodying vulnerability, melancholy, joy, and introspection within forms that evoke both nostalgia and invention. Rendered with an enduring, grounded materiality, they appear inflated or stuffed with a plush, huggable physicality, yet carry subtle psychological weight. In her ceramic vessels and sculptural works, clay becomes both subject and metaphor, retaining the artist’s hand through smoothed impressions and knobbly textures that evoke a cartoon logic in which sacred objects, miracles, and vulnerability can appear in unexpected, non-normative forms.

Shilling’s work exists between delight and discomfort, using the disarming quality of her subjects as a strategy to explore larger questions of care, empathy, and shared emotional experience. Her practice invites viewers into a benevolent yet uncanny environment where animal, mineral, and vegetal forms merge, creating a nostalgic menagerie shaped by collective memory and personal reflection. In recent years, her work has expanded into the public realm, employing scale and spectacle to address themes of environmental anxiety, climate awareness, and the fragile relationship between humans and the natural world.

Shilling studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and later attended Los Angeles City College in 2015. Her solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch in New York and Monsoon Lagoon at 356 Mission in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, including the Made in L.A. Biennial, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Jeffrey Deitch in New York and Los Angeles, Loyal in Stockholm, Josh Lilley in London, and Night Gallery and Karma International in Los Angeles, among others. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, including the LACC Dynamic Scholarship in 2015 and the Silver Key Award in 2010. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Education

2011-2012 BFA (pending), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bachelor of Fine Art
2013-2015 Los Angeles City College, Studio Art

Solo and Two Person Exhibitions

2024
OUTBURST, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA

2023
Buggy Bear Goes on a Cool Cruise, Mural Commission for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Gansevoort Landing Plaza, New York, NY
A Bug’s Life, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA

2021
The Hippest Trip in America - By Land, Air and Sea, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY

2018
Monsoon Lagoon, 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA

2017
Myth Envy: Alake Shilling and Theresa Touma, No Place Gallery, Columbus,OH

2016
Alake Shilling, Maitland Foley, Los Angeles, CA

Group Exhibitions

2025
Made in L.A. Biennial, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California
Cupped, The Wolford House, Los Angeles, California

2023
Funk You Too!, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY
Loyal @ El Royale, El Royale, Los Angeles, CA

2021
Clay Pop, Curated by Alia Williams, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY
Hot Concrete: L.A. Arrangement, Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA

2019
Punch, Curated by Nina Chanel Abney, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA
Go Away Road, Curated by Adrienne Rubenstein, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
Dirty Protest, Hammer Contemporary Collection, Los Angeles, CA
Group Shoe, Organized by Mario Ayala, in lieu, Los Angeles, CA

2018
Body, Curtain, Advance, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL
Fun House, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, England
American Fine Arts pt 1: life’s not fair and people don’t act right, BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA
ALAC Art fair, Club Pro, Los Angeles, CA
right, BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA

2017
Cool World, Club Pro, Los Angeles, CA
All The Small Things, Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA
Group Show, Unclebrother, Hancock, NY
MECA Art Fair, 356 Mission, San Juan, Puerto Rico

2015
Spectrum, BG Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
Scholarship Exhibition, Da Vinci Gallery, LACC, Los Angeles, CA
DTLA Art Walk, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Los Angeles, CA
Now Trending PVA, The Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA (juried art show)

2014
Pop-Up Gallery Show Online Vol.2, @internet-art.net

2012
Art Bash, SAIC Columbus Dr. Building, Chicago, IL

2008
Animated Film Another Day in a Crazy World, Reeves Contemporary, New York, NY

Awards

2015 LACC Dynamic Scholarship, California, LA
2012 SAIC Presidential Merit Scholarship , Chicago, IL
2010 Scholastic Art Award – Silver Key Award, New York, NY
2010 Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award Grant, Landsdowne, VA
2009 Scholastic Art & Writing Award, Gold Key Award, New York, NY
2009 California Arts Scholar, Los Angeles, CA
2008 California Arts Scholar, Los Angeles, CA

Bibliography
Stromberg, Matt, Alake Shilling interviewed, Hyperallergic, 2018
Osberg, Annabel, Alake Shilling, Artillery Magazine, 2018
Milbrath, Claire, Alake Shilling, Editorial Magazine, August 17, Issue 17, 2017
Art scholarship show presents Dynamic Exhibit, Los Angeles Collegian, May 15, P6, 2015
Conversation with Alake Shilling, The Fine Print Magazine, December 15, 2015