Meet Ilene Byers of Los Angeles / OC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ilene Byers.

Hi Ilene, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am a painter, graphic designer, production specialist, and a mom. As early as I can remember, I was drawing. My mom’s side of the family is Korean and a lot of them were skilled artists. My mom use to draw for me in church when I was young and it was the start of falling In love with the process of connecting pen to paper, creating images out of nothing, using my imagination. I began painting around 8 years old and a core memory was being in art classes and looking out the window to paint the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California near where I grew up. I still see those mountains every day, so they have become a protector and a spiritual guide for me. I left California after graduating high school and studied illustration at Parsons School of Design. From 2005-2011 I was immersed in the world of New York City, where I broadened my cultural exposure and fell in love with diaspora and became an urban anthropologist of sorts. I frequented all the art museums especially the Met and became a student of the arts that existed in and out of the museums. I fell in love with East Coast hip-hop, the 5 elements. Practicing graffiti, going to Burkina and picking up mixtapes, dancing all night at Santos Party House also was a part of my education.
in 2011 I moved back to LA and started working as a after school graffiti teacher and also started working at Diamond Supply Co. store on Fairfax. It was the apex of the LA streetwear era, the community on Fairfax was booming and full of energy. People starting brands, block parties, collaborations across the local scene, art gallery openings, musicians releasing music and placing their tapes in the store, including Nipsey Hussle. There was so much inspiration flowing. I got my first shot a graphic designing for clothes thanks to Nick “Diamond” Tershey. I began assisting design at Diamond, learning how to do tech packs, learning the business. He had built an empire off graphic tees and was inspiring everyone around him to do the same. I was there for 4 years and then went on to work at BlackScale. Mega the founder of Blackscale would do annual trips to China and Japan, which is where I gained a lot of exposure to vintage clothing and Japanese streetwear, it was deeply informative for my design sensibility with product. Another significant design job was when I worked with The Marathon Clothing from 2020-2022. After skipping around to lots of streetwear brands, I got a big break in 2022 to join Adidas Basketball as the Senior Graphic Designer. All the training as an artist, the exposure to street culture, was now projected on to a global scale. Currently, I lead design and creative direction for the Anthony Edwards signature line, where we have grown the business and Edwards into his own sub brand and continue to grow his product line under adidas Basketball.
I have also relaunched my independent design studio, IQ Design this year. Alongside studio work, freelance practice continues across three lanes: storyboard art, illustration, and brand and identity design. The range isn’t scattered — it’s the same eye applied at different scales, from a single frame to a full identity system. A parallel body of fine art work uses acrylic and plaster to explore color therapy — how color and texture can be used deliberately, the way a painter would, to affect mood and state rather than just decorate a surface. That thinking is part of why the studio’s own palette work is never arbitrary: color is treated as something with weight, not just branding.
That practice recently culminated in “Califas,” a body of work exhibited at the Fontana Community Center.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story and I hope it can inspire others to keep working towards their goals. I sometimes questioned how to be a good mother and also balance a career, but through establishing a community of good people and being resourceful I’ve somehow managed to do both. I hope other aspiring artists know you can do it all too.
-Ilene Byers
10.16.2026

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Alongside my in-house work, I run IQ Design, a multi-disciplinary studio, and maintain a freelance practice as an illustrator and storyboard artist — including illustration and animation-ready art direction for the Better Late Than Never World Tour with Romeo Santos and Prince Royce, and brand identity work for Do You Want More?, presented by Questlove and Black Thought.

I trained as a painter before I ever trained as a designer, and this practice is where that first language still lives — before branding, before clients, before deadlines.

My most recent body of work is called Califas.
I was raised in California, and the land has never let go of me. The mountains that ring my childhood are still the first thing I picture when I close my eyes — not as scenery, but as witnesses. I’ve always believed they were watching over me, holding the years the way a photograph does, except softer, and always shifting with the light. That feeling is the seed of every piece in this body of work.

Each painting starts with a canvas I stretch by hand, then a mix of acrylic and plaster I build up in ridges and folds — more like landscape than paint. The plaster holds the memory of the gesture that made it: a groove, a drip, a fold that reads differently depending on where you’re standing and how the light hits it, the same way a hillside shifts color from morning into evening. I’m not trying to depict the mountains literally. I’m trying to work the way they work — layered, weathered, built by many passes over long stretches of time.

Color, here, isn’t decorative — it’s the whole point. Each piece is really a study in what a specific color, or a specific transition between colors, does to the body standing in front of it. That’s the color therapy at the center of this work: an orange horizon isn’t a sunset, it’s an attempt to physically warm the room it hangs in. A field of blue isn’t water, it’s an attempt to slow someone’s breathing down.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
I define success as ownership of your time. If you can use your time freely and as you want to, I believe that is the new measure of success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.iqxart.com
• Instagram: @iqxart