Clarity Haynes is a painter based in upstate New York. Her work centers on the torso as a site for portraiture, queer feminist altars as a site for still life, and the subject of crowning and birth. Works in her Breast/Chest Portrait Project have focused on themes of healing, trauma, and self-determination. While the torsos primarily tell the intimate stories of other people, her still-life paintings of personal altars are self-portraits of sorts. Feminist and queer craft practices are often honored in Haynes’ work- bright colors, lively compositions, and multiple narratives conjoin in her depictions of both bodies and altars.
Recent solo exhibitions include Portals at New Discretions in New York (2024); Aldrich Projects: Collective Transmission at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (2021); and Altar-ed Bodies at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York, co-presented with New Discretions and including writing by Bradley Trumpfheller, who Haynes met at MacDowell (2020). Her first monograph, Portals (New Discretions, 2024), is available from Distributed Art Publishers. In 2026, Haynes has works included in The Woman Question: 1550-2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland will have a series of Altar paintings in A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic and Spirit at the Palms Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, CA.
At MacDowell in 2019, Haynes completed five small oil on canvas paintings, two of which appeared in her solo exhibition Altar-ed Bodies. During her 2025 residency, she worked on new paintings for her next solo exhibition at New Discretions.
