My work explores selfhood in relation to community and the complexities of articulating one’s identity. I relate personal experiences, generational stories, and broader histories to raise questions about how we define ourselves and carry culture. The work is about imposter syndrome, and diaspora, and family lineage, and longing. Each piece takes on various forms to reflect the complexities of these questions. Painting, screen printing, needle felting, and sewing all express different textures and energies across landscapes of history and memory, where central figures reenact the story being told. The uniting factor across varying senses of self, place, and material is drawing. The mark creates a specific language—a world where all of my experiences can exist at once. 

My construction of Puerto Rican and African-American narratives consults a lineage of image-making. Folk art, children’s book illustration, history painting, and my favorite childhood cartoons all overlap to express my space. The figures are the narrators, while the composition collapses time into one maximal plane. Often, everything is in focus, but the gesture of the line still shows what recedes into a background of micro marks and what projects into the foreground as a thick line or textured fabric. In some narratives, a scene of a summer cookout or sisters dressed for a family wedding comes directly from my personal archive to disentangle my lived experience. In others, a rooster fight or bomba performance is visually jumbled to reflect my limited understanding of that scene, which I know through retellings. Ultimately, I employ decisions that reflect my varied understandings of time and place. 

The result is an image that is distinct from any of its original parts. Visualizing these experiences with a variety of mediums and sources echoes the conceptual bridge—or gap—between what we believe to be true about ourselves and what is left to be discovered; between one experience of American history and another; or between the viewer and the artist.