Chintia Kirana Chinese-Indonesian American, b. 1987

Chintia Kirana (b. Jakarta, Indonesia) is a contemporary artist and cultural organizer working between Montgomery, Alabama and Brooklyn, New York. Her practice explores memory, identity, and the passage of time through painting, drawing, installation, and socially engaged projects. Working with time-bearing materials such as eggshells, cooking carbon, ash from ceremonial burnings, and soil, she creates surfaces that register transformation through processes of burning, layering, and repetition.

Drawing from experiences of cultural displacement and living between traditions, Kirana uses abstraction to explore how memory persists through material transformation. Her works hold traces of absence, belonging, and time within quiet, meditative structures, allowing materials themselves to carry the imprint of lived experience.

 

Kirana is the founder of Expose Art Magazine and co-founder of MAP (Montgomery Arts Project), initiatives that support artists through exhibitions, publications, and community-based programming. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and the Zhou B Art Center. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BA from Auburn University, and currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.