University Art Museum
Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair
August 4 - December 11, 2021
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Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski
Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Rainbow Seance, 2019, gouache, watercolor, acrylic, airbrush, paint marker, and glow-in-the-dark sculpt on paper, 48 x 34 inches, courtesy of the Hott Collection, New York [image description: A painting on paper of four figures covered in eye patterns. There are rainbows and cloudlike shapes framing them.]
Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s queer utopic fantasies of the future can simultaneously be read as ancient spiritual visions. Powerful women, whose three eyes gaze in trancelike states, perform solemn rituals while ghosts animate the physical and spiritual realms through which they pass. As Moleski considers possible futures, she reflects on other possible origins. The artist asks, “… [W]hat would our lives be like if we inherited a different genesis? What if we inherited a queer thick black and brown earthbound femme loud flamboyant genesis?” The rainbows in Moleski’s work resonate with the Pride flag of our day and are also rooted in Taíno creation myths that persist in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean despite colonization. This resistance, demonstrated through an affirmation of life, resounds throughout Moleski’s work, which the artist describes as “experiments with how to name the conflation of celebration and mourning when being racialized, liminal, and alive.”
Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski
Born in 1985 in Bordeaux, France. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Selected exhibitions include Fragmented Bodies at Albertz Benda in New York, New York (2020); Even There, There are Stars at CUE Art Foundation in New York, New York (2021); Cruising the Horizon: New York at The Latinx Project, New York University in New York, New York (2021); Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York (2019); and Vision Quest, a two-person show at the Museum of Contemporary and African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, New York (2015).
Moleski has been featured in Teen Vogue, New American Paintings, Art of Choice, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, and Momma Tried. Selected awards include a Creative Capital Award (2021); the Kindle Project’s Makers Muse Artist Award (2019); Norfolk Fellowship Award (2018); and Akonadi Foundation Beloved Community Fund (2017).
Moleski received a B.F.A. from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California in 2014 and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 2019.