Meet Leigha Vivian
Leigha Vivian is a Richmond, Kentucky based painter and artist and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in studio art with a concentration in painting from Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) in 2025.
The arts played an integral role in her development, with favorite childhood hobbies including dance, drawing, creative writing, and learning various musical instruments. Her work has been included in multiple juried shows, including Choosing Home: Dispatches from Lexington, Kentucky (2025) at LexArts in partnership with the Lexington Pride Center and the ASA Annual Juried Student Exhibition (2024 & 2025) at EKU’s Giles Gallery.
In 2025, she was the recipient of both the Chair’s Award for work exhibited in the ASA Annual Juried Student Exhibition and the Christina Thurman-Lynn Memorial Art Scholarship at Eastern Kentucky University. Leigha also served as Vice President of the Art Student Association (ASA) at EKU for the 2024-2025 academic year, assisting in events, exhibits, and fundraising for ASA and the School of Art & Design.
Drawing inspiration from historical art movements such as the Baroque, Romantic, and Neoclassical movements, Leigha’s paintings use traditional methods to convey nontraditional values. Some favorite historical women artists include Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, and Remedios Varo. In addition to tradition nal media, Leigha has a profound interest in tattooing and is currently pursuing a professional tattoo apprenticeship.
Biography
Thesis Statement
“The good wife” or “the good mother” are longstanding tropes that idealize a narrative of individual female sacrifice to care and look after others while never asking for anything in return. In religious society, a strict gender binary often restricts women to certain roles to appeal to men. At the same time, we are taught to censor our bodies, minds, and actions to protect men from lust and preserve traditional ideals of marriage with women as the “helper” to men in leadership of the home.
Even outside organized religion, women feel this pressure to fit the mold. The media tells us to be skinnier, prettier, sexier, as if the ultimate goal of a woman’s life is to attract a man. Lesbians are told they just haven’t found the right one. Women who don’t want children hear they’ll change their mind- or die sad and alone.
Growing up, womanhood felt like a looming burden; I saw becoming a wife and mother not as a question or choice but as an inevitable, inescapable part of being a woman. Raised in a family characterized by patriarchal gender roles and rampant with psychological and religious abuse throughout my childhood, I have long since abandoned my parents’ religion and begun exploring my own thoughts and beliefs about spirituality. However, it took much longer to realize that traditional thoughts about love, life, marriage, and family didn’t align with my values. These paintings document a personal journey to taking charge of my own fate, daring to break the rules, and learning to love outside traditional relationships. They discuss breaking harmful patterns, stand as a symbol of rebellion against a patriarchal narrative, and denounce the rules and regulations it imposes on women.
This work serves as a reminder and inspiration to other women that we exist as individuals outside the roles of good wife and good mother, that we don’t have to censor ourselves to be loved, and that a wealth of creativity and fulfillment lies beyond a choice to live life on our own terms. Every human being has inherent worth, and I urge women especially to remember this includes you.