Gabby Severson is a mixed Indigenous visual artist working across photography, beadwork, basketry, and sculpture. Rooted in her Oregon upbringing, her work engages themes of identity, memory, and culture, drawing inspiration from her Siletz heritage. She is a proud member of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians, located on the Oregon coast.
She takes photographs as a way to record evidence of her Indigenous identity. By working with these pictures, she uses mapping technology to draw a gridded plan for beaded works that regenerate these images. Once the picture has been pixelated through the software’s filter, she hand-beads the resulting pattern. Beading from the digital patterns becomes a visual metaphor for how cultural knowledge travels across generations, is distorted, filtered, and shifts.
She earned her BFA from Parsons School of Design and MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work in group shows at The ICA San Francisco and the Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University, and is currently showing in the 2026 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial at Oregon Contemporary.
