My creative practice explores the search for joy and purpose while reflecting on community, ancestry, spirituality, and colonial history. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, I investigate joy through repeating figures, symbols, and vibrant hues that challenge perceptions of reality, emotions and trauma. My artworks visualize real, spiritual, and imaginative spaces, holding figuration and abstraction together to expand the viewer's encounter with the physical, personal and spiritual. My paintings ask me to embody diasporic history to create marks and leave trails of coded information. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, diaspora is not exile or banishment but “a consciousness of being part of a dispersed and differentiated collectivity.” 

 

I depict remnants of the figure (heads, hands and feet) within abstracted environments where body and spirit reconnect. These extremities act as antennas for purpose and spirit, adorned with lashes, lipstick, and acrylic nails, features embodying beauty, self-love, and care in femme communities of the African Diaspora and Latin America. 

 

As an Afro-Latina, I use expanded language building to celebrate communal and intuitive knowledge while resisting verbal, cultural, and spiritual forms that erase ancestral memory. Communicating in English, AAVE, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yoruba for prayer shapes my understanding of the world. Rainbows, hearts, flowers, clouds, and other symbols recur across my work. These motifs act as nouns while my mark making functions as adjectives and verbs building my visual alphabet. 

​

My oversaturated palette and expressive mark making are both personal and political. They reflect a maximalist aesthetic that demands to be seen, like my cultures: Dominican Republic and New York City. My maximal, colorful, and layered work contends with the psychological invisibility imposed on Black and Brown bodies, souls, creativity, and histories in Eurocentric societies. It demands to be seen, felt, and experienced. 

 

In my social practice I examine how nationality, culture, and ancestry shape Latin American and African Diaspora communities' search for joy and purpose. In my project Joy's Sojourn I conduct a series of interviews forming an archive on joy’s role in the lives of these communities. These interviews ground my creative process while also holding me accountable to my communities. I also collaborate with Reva Santo on Honey & Smoke, a global artist platform creating space for artists to meditate on urgent themes through inquiry, education, interactive experiences, and digital content. Through my studio and social practice, I hold myself accountable to my communities, creating work that carries their histories, celebrates joy, and insists on visibility. My work is a space for joy, memory, and resistance while also an archive of lived experience and an opening toward futures rooted in beauty, spirit, and care.