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 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.
Program + Exhibition March-June 2024: YOUTH PROGRAM: PLANETARY KINSHIPS. 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.
Exhibition June 20024: EVERYTHING LIVING FIGHTS BACK – 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.
Residency + Exhibition July 2024: WEDDING CAKE HOUSE + AUNTY’S HOUSE presents the Mother-Artist Residency + Exhibition. 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.
Community Events
Planeta’s Espoky Rave October 2024
Aileen’s Birthday Halloween November 2024
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YOUTH WORK
POLITICS OF THE CLASSROOM – Course
A course as part of AS220’s CRTV Leadership Program. 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 knowedges, and alternative art education movements in the US as means of upholding right to literacy. This course serves to support marginalized students with liberatory knowledge on their rights to education.
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SEEING OURSELVES: THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE YOUTH – Art 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 on 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.
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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE ZINE FOR TEENS – Project Open Doors, Providence, RI 2023. Students learn emotional intelligence processes and practices through discussion of and engaging in biology & psychology through experiential learning methods. Students learning culminates in them producing a zine of their learning and what information on emotions they think their peers need. Zine includes curated texts and visuals of what emotional intelligence is as well as strategies and practices.MAPPING REALITIES – Rhode Island School of Design: Theory + History of Art + Design, Providence, RI 2023. Students learning non-human, more-than- human, Afro-Indigenous and counter-colonial mapping practices, narration and reality production. This course decanters humans in cartographic process and students are encouraged to build an ethics based in trans-species co-creations. Course resulted in students producing maps for non/-more-than humans.
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ARTISTS & DESIGNERS AS TEACHERS – Rhode Island School of Design: Teaching + Learning in Art & Design Department, 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 is. Students are required to build an art education ethics based in social justice, liberation efforts and bolstering sovereignty. Course culminates the students learning through producing art workshops they bring to Providence public schools, specifically for 3rd and 4th grad classes.
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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE THRU ART PRACTICE – Project Open Doors, Providence, RI 2022. Students learn about emotions and their functions through dialogue, readings and building a creative practice around what emotional intelligence is. Students ground their creative practice and learning through collaging different emotions and strategies for dealing with feelings and sensations.
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EXHIBTS + PERFORMANCES
EMERGENT FOREST PRESENTS: THE DEAD TEACH ME HOW TO DIE BY LETTING ME LIVE WILDLY. Performing artist: DEATH IS LOVE. Brown Arts Institute, Providence RI November 2024
WEDDING CAKE HOUSE + AUNTY’S HOUSE Mother-Artist Residency + Exhibition: Co-host and Participant. Performing Artist: HEALING THE MOTHER- AUNTY’S HOUSE, Providence, RI July 2024
LEAP DAY SHOW – Performer: MOTHER – AUNTY’S HOUSE, Providence, RI February 2024
GATEWAYS TO THE POLYCENE: Las Mascaras son Portales/PLANETATION – RISD Washington Place Gallery, Providence, RI September-October 2023
PROVIDENCE BIENNIAL: REMEDY//POESIS – Exhibitionist and Performance – Providence, RI July-August 2023
SEEING OURSELVES: THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE YOUTH – PVD Youth Art Exhibition – Providence, RI April 15th -28th 2023
EARTHEN PORTAL – MassQ Ball Arnold Arboretum – Sculpture, Boston MA July 2022
PORTRAIT OF SQUAW SACHEM – TUFTS University Gallery – Commissioned Works, Medford MA 2021
TIDAL RESONANCE – Open Door RI – Performance, Providence RI August 2021
FIRE FLOWERS AND A TIME MACHINE – WaterFire Arts Center – Reclamation Performance, Providence RI October 2020
EMANATION: INDIGENOUS FURTHERANCE – Boston Center for the Arts Residency – Sculpture, Boston, MA October 2020
THE RED DRESS LODGE – Creative City Boston Grant: New England Foundation for the Arts – Sculpture, Boston MA July 2020
NEEDS – Luna Loba – Wilbury Theatre – Performance, Providence RI February 2020
7WMXN + GRIEF – Machines With Magnets, Exhibition and Performance, Providence RI September 2019
LONELINESS – LITCrawl BOSTON – Multimedia Performance, Boston, MA June 2019
Poetry Is Busy, Boston, MA – Multimedia Performance January 2019
We Create: Women in the Arts, Boston, MA — Multimedia Performance April 2018 – 2019
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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
Grant Finalist – Pricilla Bracket Smith Award/Wellesley College 2019
Grant/Project Finalist & Awardee – Creative City Boston, NEFA 2019/20
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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.
