Introduction
Aunia Kahn is a contemporary artist and curator working across gouache, acrylic, colored pencil, and dimensional mixed media, creating layered compositions that weave personal narrative with rich cultural symbolism.
Recognized as the originator of Contemporary Symbolist Folk, a lineage rooted in symbolic depth and personal mythos, Kahn draws from French Canadian, German, Polish and Scandinavian folk traditions, Pre-Raphaelite and Surrealist lineages, and the natural world to create a visual language entirely her own. Her paintings explore sanctuary, transformation, and the threshold between life and death, articulated through a recurring iconography of women, animals, and nature, rendered in a saturated palette and dense ornamentation evocative of folk textile and decorative traditions. Having lived through years of life-threatening illness, Kahn approaches this liminal space not as abstraction but as personal terrain, giving her work a rare emotional authority.
Her work has been exhibited at the San Diego Art Institute, St. Louis Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Thinkspace Projects, Modern Eden Gallery, and Harman Projects, among others across 10 countries. She has curated national and international exhibitions and been featured in Create! Magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, and Prevention Magazine, as well as various online platforms including My Modern Met, Colossal, Booooooom, Yahoo, and Authority Magazine.
Kahn has authored and illustrated books and oracle decks published through US Games Systems, Schiffer Publishing, and Red Feather Publishing, including Silver Era Tarot, Inspirations for Survivors, Lowbrow Tarot, Tarot Under Oath, and Folk Yeah Cats. Together, her paintings, curatorial projects, and published work reflect a singular vision rooted in ancestry, resilience, and transformation.
“I don't think I would have survived this long without creativity as my anchor, a way to express and work through what life has handed me. It truly is the lifeblood of my life.”
Expect To Learn
The value naivety brings into artistic inspiration.
The differences between Contemporary Symbolist Folk and Traditional Folk art.
How a life threatening illness forced Kahn to take a new approach to her art.
The importance of creating for yourself first over your audience.
Kahn’s one piece of advice to aspiring creatives.
Interview
Which artists have had the biggest influence on your practice?
The artists that inspire me the most are children. I love the freedom they place on what they do creatively, not worried about anyone watching, just doing what they love intuitively with whatever medium they can find. I also just generally love naive art, wherever it comes from. Raw, expressive, intuitive art is for the soul. I think we’ve come to a place of being overproduced, overprocessed, and obsessed with perfection. Art is, and never will be, perfect.
How has your life outside of art shaped the artist you’ve become?
My goal in life was to be a therapist. However, when I got very sick 20 years ago, I returned to art as a salvation. Art for me has always been a way to connect to the world. I was housebound for over a decade, so being an active part of “real life” society wasn’t something I did often. Doing art, and then having a career in it, gave me connections into the world that were really helpful for keeping me alive during the hardest parts of my rare diseases. That said, not having much of an outside life, and being so isolated, has informed my art, because my journey, my struggles, my joys, my life, are all interwoven into my work. It really is like a personal visual diary that I just need to keep making.
What separates Contemporary Symbolist Folk from Traditional Folk art?
Contemporary Symbolist Folk takes the visual language of folk art, its flatness, pattern, and handmade directness, but repurposes it for personal, invented symbolism rather than inherited cultural tradition. Where folk art carries meaning passed down through community and craft, Contemporary Symbolist Folk is authored: each symbol is chosen and layered by me as a contemporary artist to speak to individual and archetypal experience.
What attracted you to creating tarot and oracle decks alongside your paintings?
Years ago I wanted to learn tarot because I was in love with the imagery and iconography. I wanted to understand the stories more than I cared to read tarot, though of course that was also an interest. In that pursuit, I decided the best way to learn tarot was to create each of the 78 cards, so I spent 6 years creating my first deck, and ever since then I’ve been in love with both tarot and oracle decks. I am still working on projects even now. Currently I am working with US Games Systems on the Altar of Becoming oracle deck. For me it’s the art, the history, the iconography, there is so much storytelling in those little cards, and with so many artists creating them, it never gets old seeing a new interpretation of a beloved card. After all these year tarot and oracle art still excites me!
Has working commercially influenced the way you approach your personal practice?
Commercial art is always interesting, and it’s handled so differently than exhibiting work. I’m honored to work along both paths. Commercial work comes with a lot more restrictions and direction than my gallery work does, but the great thing I’ve learned from it is that it often pushes you in ways you might not push yourself. It offers ideas or directions you might not naturally gravitate toward, and once you go there, you learn something new, and that often carries back into my other work and stretches my own list of ideas. I had this happen just yesterday. I am working on a big project and they want me to illustrate a character I would never thought to explore and as I created the mock up, I was like, I have to add these animals into my work! The two inform each other.
What has been one of the biggest challenges of building a career in art?
One of the biggest challenges was being allergic to nearly every traditional medium when I first started, which forced me to focus on digital work. I’m so thankful for computers and the ability to create, because back in 2004, I would have had to give up art entirely without them. It was also hard because as back then, when I started, digital art wasn’t supported in most galleries, so I had to really fight to be seen and taken seriously in the art world. On most submission guidelines or invitations for shows somewhere it would say “No Digital Art”. It was hard in another way too, since it wasn’t what I actually how I wanted to create. I’ve always loved creating with my hands, so not being able to use paint and most mediums without the risk of a life-threatening allergic reaction was a real loss. However, I am adaptable and was lucky enough to forge a career as a digital artist wooing in galleries and museums.
A few years ago, I finally got a diagnosis and medications that allowed me to start using gentle mediums like watercolor and gouache. I tried to recreate my digital work in traditional mediums and ended up hating every minute of it. I went back and forth exploring new things, losing followers and galleries, then swinging back to what people already knew. But last year around this time, I realized how unhappy I was. The second biggest challenge was stopping the art I was known for and doing a complete 360, which meant losing almost all my Patreon followers (which I closed), collectors, and galleries. When I finally committed to not going back and forth and just doing what I loved, I was happy, and honestly, I decided I didn’t care if no one liked my new work. My art was never meant to build a career, it was always first and foremost meant to be a place of solace and joy. I had lost that. So here I am now, doing what I love, and the people, collectors, and galleries around me, almost 95% of them new, actually get what I’m doing from my soul. As scary as it was to give up an entire 20-year career for something with no guarantee but genuine happiness, I would do it again.
Is there a medium or area of your practice you’d like to explore more in the future?
So many things. Not being able to touch physical mediums for almost 20 years, and now being able to, with precautions like gloves and masks, is exciting. Over the last couple of years I’ve bought so many new art supplies just to try everything. I love experimenting with paints, dry media, substrates, and of course exploring other forms in my work too. I make sculptures, I create fiber art, collage, and it feels like every week there’s something new to try. So no, there isn’t one thing, it’s everything, I want to try it all. It’s like being kept away from any kind of sugar for years, and then someone says, here’s cake, cookies, pie, candy, pick one. I’d say nope, I’m eating them all, and I’m going to end up rolling around on the floor with a stomach ache, laughing the whole time. Exploration feels like such a gift when you had it taken away for so many years.
How would you define art?
Art is everywhere and everything, and sometimes I feel there are just no words to really describe it. It’s so ephemeral and magical, something I can’t pin down with words.
What is a question you wished more people asked about your work?
I can’t think of any. I just do what I love and hope people enjoy it, and if they want ask questions, I’ll answer anything they want to know.
What is one piece of advice you would give to aspiring creatives?
Always do what you love. I know it sounds cliche, and honestly I thought it was for so many years. Do what you love and the right people will follow. Give me a break, right? It sounds so silly, but I know now, deeply, that if you love what you do, even if only one person enjoys it, you win. Life is too short to do things you hate, just to appease your socials, get likes, or please people you don’t even know.
Thank you for reading, I urge you follow along with Kahn‘s journey! Your support for the artists featured in this newsletter is never taken for granted :)
Special thanks to the cool kids in our cool kids club who keep this newsletter running ;)
Best
Alex