Crystal Clarity was born and raised in New York City, and has been committed to mastering the visual arts ever since seeing her father’s drawings on diner napkins at the age of 5. In her later adolescence, she explored the many layers of NYC through many different lenses. She has been a street vendor, a bike messenger, waitress, street performer, poet, lyricist and Graphic Designer,  but at the beginning and the end of the day she remained always a visual artist. In efforts to discover the meaning of Art, at 19 she began to volunteer with various arts organizations bringing creative programs and workshops to underserved and overlooked groups. Through the giving of time and the sharing of her talents she realized that a devotion to the arts did not have to be a self – centered pursuit. She developed a passion for service and mentoring that burned as bright as her love for drawing and would commit the next phase of her professional development to understanding how the two would interact in service of people.

For over Five years, Crystal Clarity has been the Visual Arts Instructor at El Puente; an after school community center in the heart of Bushwick. There she has facilitated art classes that inspire the youth to be leaders who are self-expressed guardians of their own community by using art as a lense to observe the self and the world. Over the past two years she has worked with Groundswell Community Mural Project assisting and leading large-scale mural projects around the city while using art as a tool to engage critical community issues and to create young leaders and agents of change. Having just completed a 4-story mural in the Bronx, Crystal is continuing her studies at the Parsons School of Design Strategies and continues to work with El Puente’s Bushwick Center.

You can contact her via e-mail @ arthirsty@gmail.com.

Click on the image on the right to enter a modest gallery of Crystal's work.