Aunia Kahn

Aunia Kahn is a contemporary artist and curator working across gouache, acrylic, coloured pencil, and dimensional mixed media, creating layered compositions that weave personal narrative with rich cultural symbolism.

Recognizsed 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.