Keita Annie Whitten is a Maine-based interdisciplinary artist whose mixed-media paintings, assemblages, sculptural Sea Goddesses, writing, music, and performance explore water, memory, ancestry, Spirit, and lived experience.

Born in New York City and shaped by decades of life between Brooklyn and Maine, Keita works with paint, sea glass, shells, gemstones, weathered wood, jewelry, pottery, natural materials, and found and repurposed objects. Her richly layered surfaces transform fragments of the natural and human-made worlds into vessels for beauty, remembrance, and healing.

Keita is the daughter of poet Nyja (Florance) Attenborough and pioneering abstract painter Jack Whitten (1939–2018). While deeply aware of this artistic lineage, she developed her own practice independently, outside of her father’s studio and without traditional art-school training. Her creative language grew instead through motherhood, performance, writing, music, movement, cultural exploration, spiritual inquiry, and a lifelong relationship with making.

Water-Life-Flow
A central current throughout Keita’s work is Water-Life-Flow—her way of exploring the fluidity and interconnectedness of life.

Water appears throughout the work as memory, womb, passage, nourishment, transformation, protection, grief, beauty, and return. Her relationship to Maine’s oceans, coves, rivers, lakes, estuaries, and shorelines intertwines with the spiritual principles of Yemaya and Oshun, as well as larger questions of ancestry, migration, feminine power, and belonging.

Whether working on a monumental assemblage or an intimate Sacred Gem, Keita returns again and again to a fundamental question:
How can what has been broken, carried, weathered, or forgotten be transformed into beauty without erasing what it has endured?

Soul Mapping
Keita creates through an intuitive process she calls Soul Mapping.
Rather than beginning with a fixed outcome, she allows materials, memory, intuition, Spirit, and felt experience to guide the work. Often, the deeper meaning of a piece reveals itself only later.

Soul Mapping is where Keita’s relationship to material, ancestry, embodied knowing, and the unseen comes fully into view.

Explore Soul Mapping Here →

An Interdisciplinary Practice
Keita’s creative life moves fluidly among visual art, writing, poetry, singing, performance, radio, movement, and hand-built sculpture.
A founding participant in Brooklyn’s Immersionist movement, she continues to approach art as experiential and embodied—not simply to be viewed, but to be felt.

Her major bodies of work include the Casco Bay–Downeast Collection, her sculptural Sea Goddesses, and the intimate Sacred Gems series.

Across these forms, the intention remains connected:
to make work that remembers, transforms, illuminates, and heals.

— Keita Annie Whitten