As a Latinx/Pan-Caribbean/Dominican York contemporary artist, my work is rooted in creating narratives essential to understanding Las Américas and the American experience. I aim to unveil the ongoing cultural encounters that continuously shape and reshape how we view, perceive, and color Las Americas. My practice is centered on the politics of inclusion. History plays a central role in how I decode and deconstruct visual narratives of power.
I engage history and historical ethnography to examine traditions, methods, and dominant societal points of view. By doing so, I seek to visually bring forth other voices, those often silenced or forgotten. Through the deconstruction and juxtaposition of symbols tied to constructed notions of Americanness, nationhood, and freedom, often embedded in slavery and oppression, I strive to present bold signs of resistance. I do this through the mixing of race and a fierce optimism.
Race and the politics of color, both formally and conceptually, are essential to my work. Since 1996, the cinnamon figure has been a constant presence in my visual language. Mixing all the colors in a palette is, to me, an inclusive gesture; the result is a cinnamon hue that represents a new race, a new aesthetic. This unique aesthetic is shaped by lush landscapes, transplantation, appropriation, and the transformation of traditions. My use of Catholic iconography, especially in my mixed-race warrior-angels, is a way of colonizing the colonizers, appropriating and transforming established symbols to create new icons.
The Atlantic Ocean, this blue liquid road and profound obstacle, continues to provoke my imagination. It represents the way out and the frontier. It maps stories of freedom, slavery, survival, and memory. It carries our DNA. Its ever-shifting tides remind me of the fluidity of identity and our collective memory. Through beauty and joy, I seek resistance. Las Américas transformed the world. They created new values, new races, and redefined Christianity and geography. In my neo-baroque tradition, with its inclusivity of spirit, I navigate between tragedy, beauty, carnival, and traces of divinity.
Through my drawings and mixed-media paintings, I create visual codes that lead to spontaneous compositions filled with allegorical meaning. Each artwork stands on its own, yet they are all connected by a thread of thought, a shared narrative. These narratives emerge through the appropriation and transformation of symbolic objects: life jackets, inner tubes, tents, newspaper clippings, and religious icons. Each carries with it a story of memory, transformation, resistance, and hope.