Pearl Bryant was born in Pensacola, FL, and grew up on the Gulf Coast. She earned her BFA in Studio Art with a focus in painting and drawing at Auburn University. She lived and worked in Atlanta, GA, for twelve years. After a sabbatical, she relocated to west Alabama where she is currently a studio artist at Kentuck Art Center.

Pearl’s paintings focus on themes of maximalism and reuse referencing mass consumption and aesthetics. She uses acrylic and nail polish palettes replete with stereotypically hyper-feminized colors and melds them with found objects and minute drawn details. In her studio practice, Pearl employs what she calls “trash walks” to discover the plethora of found objects she uses in her work. This practice aligns with her use of mindfulness and intentionality as methods to counter the frantic energy of life, as well as being rooted in an ecofeminist perspective.

Her first solo exhibition debuted in 2019. Pearl’s piece H.V. II won Director’s Choice at Georgia Artists, a statewide juried exhibition. She has shown in exhibitions throughout Atlanta and the U.S. since 2016, including work shown through both the Fulton County Fine Arts Acquisition Program and ShowerHaus Gallery in the large-scale exhibition The High Rise Show in downtown Atlanta in 2019. In 2020, Pearl exhibited work in the Valdosta National juried exhibition at Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery at Valdosta State University, GA, and in Norfolk, VA, in Persistence II, a national juried exhibition of women artists. In 2020, her work was juried into the Callanwolde Juried Exhibition in Atlanta, GA, which took place in 2021.

Pearl was a founding member of The Bakery, a multi-faceted arts complex, in southwest Atlanta in 2017. She cut her exhibitions teeth as the Gallery Manager for the in-house gallery from 2017 to 2019 when she stepped back to focus on her studio practice. During her tenure, she planned the complete renovation of the exhibition space and wrote and implemented the organization’s first Request for Proposals, leaving 10+ months of exhibition programming curated at her departure.

Pearl has begun to scale up her paintings dramatically and is now also working on sculptures made of found objects and even more experimental mixed media, evolving her work into its next iteration.

She has also continued to funnel her passion for celebrating a variety of artists’ work through her position as the Events & Exhibitions Manager for Kentuck Art Center in west Alabama.