Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (b. 1990, Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish-Gambian artist based in Los Angeles. Working primarily in figurative painting, Jallow creates psychologically intimate images in which mixed-race women occupy spaces of tenderness, contemplation, mythology, and quiet monumentality.

Drawing from her Swedish and Gambian heritage, Jallow brings together Scandinavian folklore and landscape, West African ancestry, spirituality, memory, nature, and the history of figurative painting. Her compositions move between the recognizable and imagined, creating spaces in which personal history, inherited memory, and mythology coexist.

Color moves between landscape, clothing, and skin, visually connecting Jallow’s figures to the worlds they inhabit. Thread similarly functions as both a material and symbolic language of connection, ancestry, and inheritance.

Central to Jallow’s practice is an interest in who has historically been granted permanence within painting. Beginning from an admiration for the emotional and visual power of historical painting, particularly Renaissance painting, she considers how that tradition can expand to hold mixed-race women with the same beauty, reverence, complexity, and mythological presence.

Jallow has exhibited internationally across the United States and Europe, with solo presentations in New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Milan. Her work has been featured in publications including Vogue Scandinavia, Elephant, Artnet, and Robb Report.