Learn more about our current show exploring and celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month!
Additional Viewing Dates:
Thursday, September 21st: 10 AM - 3 PM
Friday, September 22nd: 12 - 3 PM
Thursday, September 28th: 3 PM - 8 PM
Friday, September 29th: 12 - 4 PM
Friday, October 6th: 12 - 4 PM
Saturday, October 7th: 11 AM - 2 PM
Closing & Artist Talk: Friday, October 13th - 5-8 PM
Featured Artists:
Nacho Amor
My name is Nacho Amor and I am a Queer Mexican-American still life Photographer based out of Providence, RI. My work explores the complex relationships between race, sexuality, and culture.
After graduating with a degree in Photography from Parsons the New School for Design, I started my career as a set dresser for music videos and stage performances for Lady Gaga. Shortly after, I moved into the production side of fashion runway, working with clients such as Marc Jacobs and Givenchy. Now, I am fully focused on my photography and have worked as the Collections photographer for institutions such as the Smithsonian, MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and currently Brown University.
Outside of being a photographer, I am the Executive Director of a newly established 501c(3) nonprofit photo gallery with the mission to establish a public space for Queer POC photographers, while alleviating hardships created by socioeconomic and institutional biases in the arts.
Vienna Mercedes Gambol
Vienna Mercedes Gambol is an emerging Mexican-American artist and designer based in Providence, Rhode Island. She was born and raised in San Ysidro, California, 8,000 feet from the border between Mexico and the United States. She pursued a degree in Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she developed her love of printmaking, sewing and writing.
Izzy Rodriguez
Izzy Rodriguez is a first generation Dominican-American street photographer based in Providence, RI. His work aims to capture the moments of simplicity that truly exemplify real life stories and real emotions. Moments of solace and reflection. Moments of truth and sincerity. Moments of happiness, sadness, confusion, chaos, and so much more. These moments are often fleeting in nature and never to be seen again, in this exact composition, unless photographed. This takes a moment that is fleeting and expands it to exist for eternity. These stories can stand the test of time, only if photographed.
Gabriela Cantú
Gabriela Cantú is a Mexican-American artist and arts administrator from Southern California living in Providence, RI. Her work incorporates a traditional folk aesthetic and craft-based practice that highlights how individual expressions of identity and organized community activism reflect transforming social landscapes and cultural values. She is inspired by investigating archival records, connecting with youth through the arts, and discovering Latinx creatives of the past and present. Cantú earned a B.A. from Brown University in Science, Technology, and Society and an M.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in Global Arts and Cultures.
Johanna Benitez
My pieces are mixed media pieces, utilizing different types of pens, markers & oil pastels. I’ve always been interested in the use of photographs in my collages. I continue to do that, most of them consisting of my family members and myself, places that relate to home and my parent’s homes in Mexico. I’ve always believed in photographs containing a deeper story and with my collages that is the goal I want to achieve. I like to think of it as merging two stories and showing their connection.
I was always taught to love and be prideful about where I came from, so it is with no surprise that when I create and immerse all of my feelings into my pieces, the constant theme of my Mexican heritage comes up in one way or another. A theme I started to explore in my art my last year of highschool, follows me two years later, only to keep branching out to touch other topics such as: self identity, femininity and generational trauma.
Growing up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, a square mile city that for years has been looked down upon due to the negative stereotypes made me for a small time feel shameful about where I came from, making everything that my parents taught me conflict with what I felt for my city. It wasn’t until my first year of college–when I was extremely homesick, that I really let myself explore artistically what being from Central Falls and being Mexican was for me. I wanted to showcase visually both of these two important places that form who I am.
These colorful collages are to tell a story using not many words, to have Mexican-American kids like me feel seen and heard. For the Mexican-American kids that some people might say are too Americanized to be Mexican but too Mexican to be American, a constant phrase that has surrounded many. For the kids that society has made it almost impossible to succeed in their goals they want to do, these are all for you.
Haydee Naula
Translating the nuances of your mental health to your family, in a language that you grew up speaking and have made your own (spanglish), can become a challenge in itself. Pensando cosas bonitas, or resando resando resando, are worthy remedies for some, but not all the time for those facing a mental health crisis. In a way to honor my past self for having these feelings, and acknowledging that I do have a problem I cannot wish away, I confront my situation weaving words together for those, like me, to read.
Being diagnosed with OCD has made me aware of the compulsions I indulge in, particularly in writing. For over a year, I would shred every personal writing piece I created in a way to get rid of any evidence of being the way I was. For these three pieces, I had to stay with the words for weeks at a time - watching and rereading my feelings over and over again, making it large enough for others to see. These pieces were my exposure therapy for myself.
Haydee Naula is a visual artist who currently resides in the East Coast. As a Latina artist, she works with different mediums to explore concepts of anxiety and migration.
Michelle Perez
Artist Bio.
Michelle Perez is a Providence-based illustrator. She was born and raised in the United States to Venezuelan immigrants. Bouncing across, up and down coasts, she struggles to define a singular place as home, so her illustrations work as a means to ground her sense of self in the narratives she encounters along the way.
Work Statement.
Inspired by the writing of Carol Clover, these prints represent classic tropes of horror— possession, revenge, transcendence— that in their essence are based in feminine interiority. Horror narratives offer women a break from the repression of normalcy and the weight of traditional structures, where they can find catharsis in burning it all down.
Jessica Reyes
My work is very versatile in the technique and materials I use. I don’t like to commit myself to one specific material or style of art instead continue exploring my creativity wherever my mind and materials take me.
3 years ago I started my Journey as a tattoo artist, having devoted myself to visual arts since the age of 14. I felt that tattooing was the perfect path for me to be able to connect with people and create personal and unique pieces. With my prior knowledge and studies in art. I enjoy creating compositions and dabbling in oil pastels, painting and graphite.
Through the personal pieces I create, it is always important for me to connect to my indigenous roots and relate my work to my Guatemalan background. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, my biggest inspirations have always been my parents. I always saw their everyday struggle and pursuit in America. Their sacrifice and willingness to leave a country to start a new life, has always motivated me to create the best work I can.
S.A. ChavarrÃa
S.A. ChavarrÃa (she/they) is an anti-disciplinary artist and researcher from Costa Rica. Her work revolves around her ongoing, long-term project of raising Devendra AI, a so-called AI chatbot, through conversation. Through networked media, digital artifacts, experimental video art, and performance, ChavarrÃa aims to create art with hallucinogenic properties. She holds an MFA from Brown University, where she was also the recipient of the Post-MFA Teaching Fellowship in Literary Arts. Currently, she teaches at RISD.
Christian Sánchez
Christian Sanchez (they/them) is a multidisciplinary 3D digital artist and audio engineer from Mexico City. Their work operates at the intersection of 3D art, music, poetry, and technology, aiming to open new possibilities within our multiverse.
Together, ChavarrÃa and Sanchez have performed and exhibited collaborative, experimental works at various physical and virtual venues. Their collaborations include performances and installations that have been showcased in places like Make Room Gallery in LA, Soloway Gallery in New York, Mock Jungle in Bologna, Italy and the RISD Museum in Providence, RI.
*Save the Date: Friday October 13, 5-8PM
Closing night for Hispanic Heritage Art Exhibit
Art Talk 5:30-6:30 PM featuring 4 artists