Working across public art and figurative painting, I explore how individual and collective experiences shape the social fabric of the communities we inhabit. I create public interventions that incorporate painting and curating my presence in the public space of SoHo. I have been there for the past six years, with this year possibly being the one where my active presence will shift into an investigation of how what we regard as routine and mundane shifts into absence.
My abstract public works creates a space for encounter and reflection, inviting diverse audiences to engage with art outside institutional settings.
In parallel, my figurative work centers on the experiences of immigrants, highlighting the cultural knowledge, resilience, and human connections they contribute to the societies they join. Rather than focusing on migration solely through displacement or loss, I seek to reveal its capacity to enrich communities and expand shared cultural narratives.
As an independent artist, I am interested in giving form to stories that are frequently overlooked or simplified. My commitment to making visible perspectives that challenge singular histories and fixed identities, while embracing the complexity, plurality, and lived experiences that shape contemporary culture are at the center of my presence in the public space.
I create and curate my own presence on a wall in SoHo, New York. There, I curated a project I titled: “Across The Street.”
Across The Street examines the structural exclusion experienced by a majority of underrepresented and minority artists who work outside established networks of visibility and institutional support.
The title refers not only to a literal street but to the often invisible divide between those who have access to cultural power and those who remain outside of it, despite their physical and professional credentials and proximity.
The project addresses the reality that race, gender, finances and access play.
Most influential galleries, museums, collectors, and decision-makers may be only “across the street,” yet many artists continue to be overlooked because society shapes how they relate to the networks that shape recognition and opportunity as well as to what art is and how context shapes value.
The distance is or is not only physical but systemic. By presenting work in the public space, I bypass conventional gatekeepers and create an alternative site of visibility and dialogue.
Across the Street questions who is seen, who is ignored, and how cultural value is constructed. It proposes the street as a democratic space where art can meet audiences directly, while exposing the invisible barriers that continue to determine whose work enters the canon and whose remains unseen. My research concludes that ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic factors play a crucial role.
My work celebrates the plethora of voices left out, through highlighting how the concept of art and culture must materialize to intervene to bridge those gaps through art, music, and all art forms.
Through my figurative work, I attempt to reach a wider audience to highlight the importance of celebrating the great cultural contributions that immigrants and people from all backgrounds contribute to their communities, cities and respective new countries.
Across The Street highlights that often times what is left out, discriminated, labeled, undervalued, holds tremendous cultural significance and value.
My project challenges the public and the dominant forces to reconsider what and who they hold valuable and the reasons while asking them to examine how they arrive at those decisions.
