Symone Lakes is a contemporary artist born in Miami, Florida. She made Atlanta, Georgia her home in the early 90s and currently lives and works in the metro area. Her work explores fashion as a form of personal and political expression and how style reflects movements in Black culture and identity in America.

Her interests and passions are made evident by her artistic journey which has always been adjacent to and incorporating fashion and beauty. Her professional start came during her college years in Macon, Georgia where she personalized t-shirts (as SYM1 Did It!) for other students. Years later, she would transform her canvas paintings into textiles (as Omi Grace) which she used to create handbags and headwraps. This period coincided with the height of the natural hair movement where her work prominently featured stylized portraiture with a focus on natural hair. Her current work utilizes elements from each of her past creative periods to construct large collages featuring her preferred subject- Black women.

Symone’s art reminisces on past fashion and beauty movements while envisioning the future of fashion through her own lens evoking both nostalgia and anticipation for looks to come. She constructs portraits with paint and paper, often incorporating images of unconventional items, as she believes “form and function need not align.” Symone takes a stylist’s approach to completing her work, which she “accessorizes” with paints and markers paying homage to her previous artistic phases.

In 2019, she held her first solo exhibition, “1 of Minnie,” where she painted a 240 sq ft painting comprised of 1,000 individual portraits as a dedication to the strength and beauty of Black women. She has also served as a panelist and speaker for artists and creatives at the University of Alabama and Netflix.

Currently, Symone is working on a series of self-portraits using photography from various stages of her art practice.