I am in a moment of artistic transition. For years, I painted the child who had to leave Puerto Rico, mixing oil paint with crayons and magic markers to give her displacement a place to be seen. The question behind that work, what is home, has not gone away, but it has moved inward. I am now thinking about Black femininity and the body as the first home, and the most contested one. Are we at home in our own bodies, bodies that were mapped, owned, surveilled, and displaced long before we were born into them? I am interested in how architecture, through the dwelling, the property line, and the grid, has been used to order and contain Black women’s lives, and in what it might mean to build a home.
These questions lead me back to the little pink wooden house of my maternal great-grandmother, Carmen Antonetti, in Patillas, Puerto Rico. She was a midwife. Her doorways were hung with curtains, fabric you pushed aside with your hand to pass from one room into the next. I think of those curtains now as portals. They were thresholds that moved with the wind and with the body. A woman who spent her life guiding other women through the most intimate passage there is, from one body into the world, lived in a house where every passage was soft.
Pink Matter (2026)
My materials have shifted with these questions, and fabric is now at the center of the work. I print architectural drawings, maps, and photographs of places onto textile, including silk, and arrange or hang them so they can be touched, moved through, and pieced back together. Fabric is the material closest to the body. It covers, it shelters, it takes the shape of whoever passes through it, and unlike a wall or a plan, it gives way. It also carries an inheritance: my paternal grandmother’s practice of sewing, of making something useful out of fabric, of repair. Moving between my two homes, Puerto Rico and Atlanta, I am following Black experiences of place-making across the US South and the Caribbean, looking for the portals women have always made inside structures built to control them.