Sky Dai
Visual Art
Interlachen, FL
Sky Dai is a queer, disabled, emerging artist living in southern Appalachia. Sky's oil paintings are inspired by visions, dreams, grief, trauma, hope, and healing. After surviving Hurricane Helene’s flooding, Sky received a grant to attend the Vermont Studio Residency. When a bad accident left Sky wheelchair bound for most of the past year, Sky dove head first into painting, again, using it to cope with the pain, and the fact that they couldn’t walk, move, or leave their house on a mountain. Sky was awarded the Prairie Fellowship (for disabled artists) to attend this residency at Ragdale.
In their most recent paintings, they are exploring medicine-work, the astral realm, religion, disability, and processing the destruction from Hurricane Helene's flooding. Inspired by the DIY culture of Black Mountain College, Sky mixes fashion design, painting, and performance, while employing symbology from tarot cards, religious iconography, queer culture, and domestic space. Sky distorts perspectives and figures in their drawings and paintings to reference how traumatic stress causes the brain to collage fragments of memory, to rewrite these experiences in collages of paint.
In 2022, Sky Dai received the Emerging Young Artists Award of Excellence from The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and had their work purchased for the permanent collection on Capitol Hill. Sky has a BFA in fine arts and creative writing from Columbus College of Art and Design. They have 2 solo shows coming up in the next year at Pink Dog Creative in Asheville, NC, May, 2026 and Espiral Azul/Blue Spiral at Artspace in Richmond, VA, September-November 2026. Sky also makes hand-painted clothing and sells them online and in boutiques around the U.S. Cloud Monet, is Sky’s familiar, companion, and guardian angel, poodle service dog.