One artist. Many shades. A single, layered life.
Delethia Ridley Malmsten is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly between the visual, the musical, and the literary. Painter, mixed-media maker, vocalist, and writer — she treats each medium as another way of telling the same truth.
Daughter of activist and Ms. magazine co-founder Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Delethia carries that legacy of vision and voice into work that is intimate, honest, and unmistakably her own. Her gallery, Shades of Life Street Gallery, gathers it all under one name.
Mixed Media & Painting
Color, texture, and found materials layered into work that lives somewhere between memory and dream — figure, abstraction, and everything in between.
A Singer's Voice
Rooted in a musical family — the Ridley Family Singers — with decades of stage work spanning R&B, jazz and blues, and pop rock.
Words on the Page
Author of Shades of Life — short reflections, poems, and stories drawn from a life of art, faith, family, and legacy.
Every painting, every song, every page is just another shade of the same life — a way of saying I was here, I saw, I felt, I sang it back.— Delethia Ridley Malmsten
Shades of Life
Shades of Life: Poems and Paintings brings Delethia’s two voices — the painter’s and the poet’s — into a single volume. Her paintings sit alongside her poems, each reflecting the other: color answering language, language answering color.
It is a quiet, color-saturated book. Like her canvases, it asks you to slow down and notice what the light is doing.
Songs from the stage.
Standards on the Carnival Paradise main stage, jazz club sets in New York and DC. Tap any card to watch on YouTube.
Prints, originals, and small editions.
The Shades of Life Street Gallery shop is being curated. Check back soon — or reach out about commissions and original work.
Inquiries, commissions, performances.
For original paintings and commissions, prints from the Shades of Life Street Gallery, booking inquiries, press, or a note about the book — write any time. Replies usually come within a few days.