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Zoe Yates is a painter, ceramicist, and poet currently living and working in Cincinnati, OH. Her work celebrates and finds beauty within the rejected and leans heavily into abstraction and intuitive processes. When she's not creating art, she is teaching young adults, driving roller coasters, or hanging out with her cat. 
Yates received her MFA from University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning in 2024. She previously received her BFA in Studio Art and English at Glenville State University in 2022, and an Associate of Art degree from Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College. Her visual art has been displayed throughout Ohio, West Virginia, and Michigan. 
I am making art with a particular understanding at its core—this understanding is too universal to constitute an artist’s statement, yet it is integral to understanding my work: all creative work—the paintings and the stories and the poems and the sculptures—are an effort to use the specifics of our lives, perceptions, opinions, and experiences in order to connect with the people around us.
              My work is highly autobiographical and deeply rooted in my own experiences, identities, and emotions—all dialed up to 11 to create work that is messy, vivid, visceral. In making art, I craft the myth of myself—telling you my stories in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will look at my work and say “you felt that, too?”
              I am as drawn to messiness, horror, and failure as I am beauty, joy, and skill, and these notions are blended in my practice to better find the beauty of horror, the skill inherent to messiness, and the joy of failure.
              At present, my work primarily takes the form of altered ceramic forms, stylized and abstracted self-portraiture, and ink-and-gouache fields of color, line, and shape. I pride myself on multidisciplinarity and multiplicity—in addition to my favored mediums of painting and ceramics, I also incorporate poetry and essay-writing, zine-making, monotypes, crocheted and fiber art, and any other form of making that the moment may call for.
My work is influenced by:
  • Naudline Pierre, Sydnie Jimenez, Devan Shimoyama, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Kathy Butterly, Eva Kwong, Cindy Sherman, Joan Mitchell, Yayoi Kusama, Frida Kahlo. 
  • J. Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure 
  • The tireless work of feminist, LGBT, and Appalachian artists, writers, critics, theorists, and activists throughout history. 
  • A variety of miscalleneous sources including but not limited to: horror films and literature, Dolly Parton, literature and mythology, Karyn Kusama's 2009 cult classic Jennifer's Body, and above all else, the lives and creativity of the people around me.