Aineki Traverso (b. 1991, Washington, DC) is a painter based in Atlanta and a current resident in the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary. Aineki’s work has most recently been exhibited in spaces such as Wolfgang Gallery (Atlanta, GA), Gallery 495 (Catskill, NY), MEY Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Swan Coach House Gallery (Atlanta, GA), and Johnson Lowe (Atlanta, GA). Aineki has attended residencies at R&F Handmade Paints, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and VCCA.Aineki is a recipient of the 2024 Atlanta Artadia award, the SEEN recognition award, the Nexus Fund grant, the Idea Capital grant, and the Edge Award from the Forward Arts Foundation. Aineki graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013.

Aineki employs the rhetoric of painting to articulate a personal narrative rooted in poetics and impossibility. Aineki's filmmaking background provides a conceptual and material foundation for a phenomenological approach to painting, in which site-specific installations serve as allusions to the gaze, the lens, architectural space, and situational aesthetics. The iconography in Aineki’s paintings is derived from a personal archive that includes inherited and found materials, the foundation of which relies on thousands of family photos that span generations and homelands and contain multitudes of histories, memories, and fantasies.


ainekitraverso@gmail.com