Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Utilizing drawings, video, sculpture, performance and installation, her work is a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there.
Drawing inspiration from visual systems of communication such as comics, cartoons, codices, Egyptian scrolls, sympathetic magic, Caribbean Surrealisms, and alchemical diagrams for transformation, Amaryllis creates non-linear symbol sets that buck colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Where taste has been constructed by these notions, she aims to create work of questionable taste, utilizing color and material classed as “femme” and casting it to the center of the circle. Illuminated with fluorescents, metallics, and iridescence, these images refuse a naturalizing aesthetic of the universe.
Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco).
ARTIST STATEMENT
The core of my art making practice is storytelling. I make large-scale images of psychic rebellion and objects which reconceptualize Divine power as ungodly and hyper feminized. I tell fantasies of survival for those of us not meant to outlive the hydra of American imagination. Moving constantly around the vast United States as a young queer Puerto Rican girl, I witnessed the malleability of perception; that the categories we cling to as cultural absolutes are unstable at best. This forged an understanding that art creates an environment of revolt - a way to take pleasure in things we were taught to be ashamed of: Our femininity is Brown and Black and outrageous. Our queer histories have been burned. Our ancestors are unnamed and die young. In the written account of the world, we’ve hardly existed - and yet here we are. The original definition of Utopia is no place. We are Utopic by design.
I move between drawing, sculpture, video, performance and installation, using materials such as sequins, mirror, beauty supplies, comics, clay and watercolor to employ oversaturated girl-like color and make images of inappropriate divinity. I draw inspiration from spiritual art, as it attempts to describe what we don’t yet have language for. I aim to queer spiritual implications of purity, using symbols that center Black and Brown femme iconography.
I build worlds from fantasy and craft, creating artworks that unbind us from trauma. Fantasy is an animal instinct that human psyches conjure to survive. When enduring existential threat, fantasy makes survival possible. Take away someone's ability to fantasize and you take away psychic rebellion. As with fantasy, it’s proven that craft practices soothe the impact of trauma. Yet, even as the psychosomatic significance of these methods are acknowledged, art from traumatized communities based in fantasy and craft remains devalued, erased, or stripped of intellectual worth into anonymous objects, mined for inspiration.
My desire to participate in the artworld stems from a metaphysical hunger to uplift my communities in our collective psyche and complicate the visual culture that keeps us handcuffed to a perpetual past. The work I make is in service of our bliss and complexity. Continuing subversive traditions of fantasy and craft, I build lush Femme cosmologies which allow our stories to remain kaleidoscopic and out-of-control.
