Mania in Bloom

Mania in Bloom is one of the most personal and significant paintings I have ever created. I am a Cherokee Nation artist who has struggled deeply with my mental health, and this work was created during a summer when I was experiencing severe, unmedicated mania.

At the time, I was unable to receive the care I desperately needed. Financial hardship and limited access to mental healthcare left me navigating one of the most difficult periods of my life largely on my own. As an Indigenous person, this experience also exists within a much larger reality of inadequate access to healthcare and resources in our communities. For me, those disparities are not statistics or distant conversations—they are something I have personally lived.

The bright colors in Mania in Bloom represent the part of me that has always been colorful, energetic, playful, and determined to find optimism even in difficult circumstances. But beneath that brightness is a mind moving faster than I could control.

The writing throughout the painting is intentionally fragmented, crossed out, layered, and often incoherent. It reflects the way my thoughts felt at the time—ideas colliding with one another, words losing their meaning, and my mind struggling to make sense of itself. The flowers become a visual contradiction: something beautiful blooming from an experience that was incredibly painful.

I created this piece while I was living through something I did not yet know how to understand. Looking back, Mania in Bloom became a record of that version of me—of the chaos, creativity, vulnerability, and resilience that existed simultaneously.

This painting is not a celebration of mania. It is a reminder that there can be beauty in survival without romanticizing the pain that made survival necessary.