André Leon Gray was born in 1969 in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives and works as a self-trained interdisciplinary artist. Through installations, tar paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, video, and audio, he explores power structures, social hierarchies, culture, identity, and history. His artistic practice primarily employs discarded and reclaimed objects charged with sociopolitical meaning to forge connections between the past and the present.
His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Full Spectrum Dominance, Artspace, Raleigh (2025); Post Hip Hop? or Return of the Boom Bap!, Project Row Houses, Houston (2024), and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2023), curated by william cordova; To the Hoop: Basketball in Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2020); and Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019–20). In 2023, he produced two Miami bass-inspired songs for william cordova's installation in the traveling exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.
Gray is the recipient of the 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellowship and the 2023 21c Research Triangle Artadia Award. He was the 2024–25 Sylvia Smith '73 Artist-in-Residence at Dickinson College and has participated in several residencies, including the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency (2024), the McColl Center Artist Residency (2022), and the Fountainhead Residency (2011).
Gray's work is held in the permanent collections of the California African American Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at North Carolina State University.