Manycolors (Australian-American b.1989) is a single mother, scholar, youth arts educator and interdisciplinary artist known for their emotionally-excavating artworks and ritual performances. Manycolors utilizes their racialized, marginalized/impoverished upbringing and experiences of being a disconnected/reconnecting person of mixed-raced/ethnic heritage in their art practice to “move towards existential reconciliation and evolving beyond the [western] human, restoring a sense of beingness, and reclaiming the self from the desires of white supremacy”. Their scholarly work centers trans-species kinships and decenters human supremacy seeking to understand the human’s role in a planetary future.
Manycolors runs youth arts programs yearly for elementary, middle and high schoolers that are rooted in political liberation, planetary kinships and reframing art as a mechanism for growing, learning and sharing. Manycolors founded the community arts studio AUNTY’S HOUSE in Providence, RI in 2023 to fulfill the need for a parent/youth centered art space that bolsters multigenerational engagement. Manycolors is an adjunct faculty at Rhode Island School of Design.
Tintype by Rachel Maeve. 2023
ARTIST’S CV
AUNTY’S HOUSE: Founder/Executive Director. Founded 2023 Providence RI.
AUNTY’S HOUSE is a community arts studio that serves the people of Providence with event space, access to workshops and programming, art studio rentals and community events. AUNTY’S HOUSE centers parent-artists and their children, the youth of Providence, and our QITBIPOC community.
PROGRAMS/EVENTS HOSTED:
LEAP DAY SHOW February 2024: This show consisted of eleven local performers, poets and artists engaging the phenomenon of the Leap Day through a variety of performance mediums.
YOUTH PROGRAM: PLANETARY KINSHIPS. Program + Exhibition March-June 2024. Youth arts workshop and exhibition 3rd-12th grade. Students worked collectively while learning about the planet and all the different kinds of people that live on the planet. The students utilized their learning to produce paper maché and cardboard sculptures of the different elementals and beings of the planet that were featured in their exhibition.
EVERYTHING LIVING FIGHTS BACK Exhibition June 20024. Curated by Shey ‘Rí Acu’ Rivera, featuring Feda Eid, Luana Morales, and Shey ‘Rí Acu’ Rivera Ríos. This exhibition was a reconfiguration of the exhibit ‘Nothing Living Lives Alone’ and its cancellation and censorship by Providence College. The reconfiguration talked about the resilience and cultural power of people who come from lineages impacted by colonization. The works explored the role of healing as a cultural power of survival and as a vessel for activism. Mediums included video, installation, mixed media works, and photographs.
WEDDING CAKE HOUSE + AUNTY’S HOUSE Residency + Exhibition July 2024 for Mother-Artists and their children. A residency curated to gather and support artist-mothers and their children. The participants were supported with studio space, materials access, and childcare. The participants spent the week sharing and discussing each others’ works and creating pieces that spoke the issues around motherhood, womxnhood, and childrearing in a colonial society that were shown in their exhibition. The children were provided with a summer camp style structure which included their art pieces in the exhibition.
ENTRE MUNDOS Exhibition November 2024. Curated by Brown University student David Felipe. Exhibition consisted of 20 queer Mexican-American artists displaying work on their experiences. ENTRE MUNDOS highlighted the queer Mexican-American diaspora and vitality with the opening consisting of culturally specific locally made food, Brown Uni’s Mariachi Band, and performances.
Community Events
Planeta’s Espoky Rave October 2024
Aileen’s Halloween Dance Party November 2024
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PERFORMANCE/EXHIBITIONS
AUNTY’S HOUSEWARMING Exhibition, Director + Contributing artist. Providence, RI March 2025
REPARENT ME- Director + Performing artist, AUNTY’S HOUSE, Providence RI January 2025
Youth Arts Exhibitions, Educator and Curator, Providence RI April 2023 & June 2024
Gateways to the Polycene, Participating Exhibitionist, Providence, RI September-October 2023
WaterFire Biennial: Remedy, Participating Exhibitionist, Performing Artist, Providence, RI July 2023
Seeing Ourselves: The Future Belongs To The Youth, Youth Art Exhibition Curator, Providence, RI April 2023
Water is our Kin – Tidal Resonance, Performing Artist, Providence, RI August 2021
Fire Flowers & A Time Machine – Grief, Performing Artist, Providence, RI October 2020
LOVE IS RED – CloudCafe, Virtual Performing Artist, Providence, RI March 2020
NEEDS – Luna Loba, Performing Artist, Providence, RI – February 2020
MasQ Ball Festival-Contributing artist – Sculpture, Arnold Arboretum, Boston MA 2022
Two As One – We Create: Women in the Arts, Performing Artist, Boston, MA – April 2018 + 2020
7WMXN + Grief – Machines With Magnets, Exhibition + Performing Artist, Providence, RI – September 2019
There Is No Binary – LITCrawl, Performing Artist, Boston, MA – June 2019
Loneliness – Poetry Is Busy, Performing Artist, Boston, MA –January 2019
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TEACHING
Growing the Community: Artistic Interventions
Teaching & Learning in Art & Design Department. Rhode Island School of Design 2025 + 2026
Students will engage and study liberatory efforts on education (Black Panther Liberation Schools, North American Indigenous Education histories and contemporary efforts, Decolonizing Education practices, Disability Rights in Education, etc.) as a means of informing their own practice as arts educators. Students are formed into groups which will conduct two arts workshops each for Providence youth in partnership with community arts studio AUNTY’S HOUSE during the course.
Kinshiping Futures: Trans-Multi-Species Design Systems
Industrial Design Department Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI 2024
Students engage architectural and industrial design from the perspective of trans-multi species cohabitation. The intention of this course supports students centering ecosystems over anthro-centric hierarchies in their thinking and design practices. This course results in students redesigning chosen parts of Rhode Island School of Design campus to be multi-trans-species inclusive as a response to climate catastrophe and the unknown future of our planet.
Politics of the Classroom
AS220 CRTV Leadership Program contributing course, Providence, RI 2024
This course leads students through a brief history of the US Education system and its relationship to oppression of racialized and marginalized people. The students engaged histories such as the school to prison pipeline, the Black Panther Movement, American Indian Movement and Indigenous people’s efforts to maintain traditional knowledges, and alternative art education movements in the US as means of upholding the right to literacy. This course serves to support marginalized students with liberatory knowledge on their rights to education.
Planetary Kinships – Youth Arts Workshop Series + Exhibition
AUNTY’S HOUSE, Providence RI 2024
This program is an art workshop series working towards an exhibition on the topic of current and future wellbeing of our planet as imagined by the youth who are the inheritors. The series invites youth from elementary, middle and high school to collectively create an art installation on the big topics of our planet, our stone, plant and animal relatives, and ourselves. Each week students and the instructors will work together to make artworks that engage themes such as “what is a planet? Who are stone people? How are plants our relatives? Do animals have culture? What is a human?” in an attempt to imagine what kind of future we can create with care.
Seeing Ourselves: The Future Belongs To The Youth – Youth Arts Program + Exhibition
The Wurks, Providence, RI April 2023
This workshop series was grounded in providing teens with language and critical engagement skills to talk about the issues of the future they are struggling with, as well as provide the youth with the space to tell adults what they needed to say about the future they are inheriting. This project consisted of 3 workshops: gathering to talk about issues and possible needs/solutions to those issues, learning how to transform ideas into creative works, producing creative works and installing an exhibition. 10 Providence teens participated in this project and showed their art piece. The exhibition took place at The Wurks for a 2 week showing.
Emotional Intelligence Zine for Teens
Project Open Doors, Providence RI 2023
In this workshop series teenage students learn about emotional intelligence processes and practices through zine making. The students are tasked with disseminating their learning into a zine consisting of texts and visuals of emotional intelligence topics the participating teens felt relevant for their peers. The course culminated in the students redistributing their zines in their communities.
Mapping Realities
Theory & History of Art & Design Department. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI 2023
Students engage non-human, more-than-human, Afro- Black- Indigenous, and counter-colonial mapping practices, narration and reality production as a means of decentering western human centric mapping practices. Course resulted in students producing maps for non-more-than-humans in various formats.
Artist & Designers as Teachers
Teaching & Learning in Art & Design Department. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI 2023
Students engage topics of k-12 art education, disability arts education, child rearing pedagogies of the 20th and 21st centuries and what being an art teacher can mean. Students are tasked with curating art workshops for elementary schoolers which they will conduct in specified local public schools. The intention of this course is to ground students with real world experience.
Emotional Intelligence Thru Art Practice
Project Open Doors, Providence RI 2022
Students learn about emotions and their processes through dialogue, readings and building a creative practice around emotional intelligence. Students will produce collage pieces on a variety of emotions.
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EDUCATION
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI — MA Fellowship Graduate Position in the Global Arts + Culture Program
2020–2022
Goddard College, Plainfield, VT — BA Decolonization Studies
2015–2019
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ART RESIDENCIES
Materia Abierta, Mexico City, MX – August 2023
The Repair Artelier, Providence, RI – October 2019-June 2020
Boston Center of Arts, Boston, RI – July-November 2020
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PUBLICATIONS
TRANSFORMATIVE MOTHERSCHOLARSHIP IN ART: Public Pedagogies of Childhood Anthology. Contributing essay: Rhizomatic Motherhood. 2024
Brown Arts Institute MOVEMENTS JOURNAL. Contributing essay: Sympoietic Mapping: Rotating Towards a Politics of Care. 2023
YOU ARE HERE: The Journal of Creative Geography – Counter/Cartographies Vol. Contributing essay: Sympoietic Mapping: Rotating Towards a Politics of Care. 2023
MA THESIS: Colonial Mapping, Heteropatriarchy and the Remaking of the World – Rhode Island School of Design. 2022
Columbia Journal. Interview: Grief- The Other Side of Gratitude – Nov. 29th 2019
Mount Island Magazine – Issue #4 – Oct. 2019
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AWARDS
Rhode Island School of Design John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Nominee — 2025
Interlace Teaching Artist Grant. Grantee — 2024
Rhode Island School of Design Presidential Fellowship. Grantee — 2020-2022
New England Foundation of the Arts: Creative City Boston. Grantee — 2020
Priscilla Bracket Smith Award. Grant Finalist – 2019
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I honor the Nipmuc, Narragansett, Massachuset, and Wampanoag people and their ancestors whose lands my work is fed by and created on. I am deeply humbled and grateful to be a guest living on these lands that I call home. I acknowledge the tribes of these lands and their enduring and persevering lives that stretch from the past, into the present and far into the futures. INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ARE STILL HERE AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE HERE.
HEALTH AND HARMONY
