Black Venus
Black Venus grew up surrounded by artists and educators. They are a renaissance, finding liberation in balancing different art forms including, but never limited to, poetry, theater, and music. The art of Black Venus centers their experience as a queer black female-bodied individual born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Aside from creating, Black is an active community organizer. They collaborate with fellow artists on programming that aims to dismantle oppression and promotes healing through creative practices. For more information about the art of Black Venus, future performances and/or community events you can follow them on Twitter/IG @blackv3nus or visit their website blackv3nus.com. For performance and collaboration inquiries email artofblackvenus@gmail.com.​
meet the artists
Amelia spinney
Amelia Spinney is an artist and arts educator working out of the greater Boston area. Spinney currently works as a teaching assistant for Harvard University's Visual and Environmental Studies department. As a Latinx person who is also a member of the trans/queer community, Spinney is deeply interested in the aesthetic expression of identity politics. Recent group exhibitions of Spinney's art include "ARTcetera" at the Castle at Park Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts, and "Borders" at the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild in San Diego, California. Recent solo exhibitions include "With Wings as Eagles" at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Get to know the artists who will be presenting works/pieces of themselves for Exist.
Jacob Nguyen
Jacob Nguyen is a printmaker/artist based out of Boston where he is currently attending Massachusetts College of Art and Design for his BFA. Incorporating mark-making as well as a wide range of color, he explores issues of compulsory heterosexuality, the fetishization of hyper-masculinity, and the white-washing of queer demographics as determined and depicted through visual media. His work places an emphasis on the human figure and also acts as a narrative that reflects on events both past/future. As a queer Asian individual, his work has largely developed over the years to focus on performative identities while also acting as a means of autoethnography. This allows him to critically examine and deconstruct the highly sexualized and exotified stereotypes associated with Asian individuals, stemming from the European-colonization of Asian countries and the oppressive and divisive concept of the Eastern “Other.”
naijah nine
Naijah is a Boston based artist who specializes in portraiture and character design. She received her BFA in Illustration at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
dominique coley
Dominique Coley is a Queer Spoken Word Artist from Brockton, MA. Coley was always one to tackle any and everything she could get her hands on. By the time she was seven her passion for music expanded beyond singing into playing the drums. Dancing later on entered the scene for her at the age of eleven, as did poetry. She received her first journal to write poetry in, from an elementary school librarian who cried upon reading her piece. Even so, it wasn’t until she overcame clinical depression in her final years of high school, that she began to take her writing seriously. Although she began writing at 11, she was never bold enough to share her words until her senior year of high school. One day in 2014, she made the decision to perform at a random open mic to get some things off her chest. The judges and audience's response made her realize that she had a gift. It was during that period that she finally understood how important Art is to
the world, because to this day she vouches that it was the only internal thing that kept her alive during those dark times. By fall 2016, (after a long period of writers block ) she started to hone her skills as a poet, and began performing on college campuses, and open mics, in and out of state. Dominique Coley is an artist who likes to bring overlooked, heart wrenching realities to life. By story telling through the perspective of diverse lives, Coley’s objective is to use her poetry as a way to subconsciously force different people to experience different kinds of realities. Her goal is to unite as many people as possible by showcasing the various kinds of crosses that people bear. You can keep up with all Dominique Coley’s new projects by following her on Instagram @Dom.Coley.
Andrea Alejandra Gordillo Marquina
Andrea Alejandra Gordillo Marquina identifies as a queer mestiza artist-educator-bridge-immigrant from Perú. Their particular lens on inclusion focuses on the link between representation of self and power in the public arena for migrants and displaced people, with a particular focus on adolescents, women, and LGBTQ communities. Their work strives to build bridges between communities they belong to and platforms for those communities to share stories to combat the "dominant narrative." They are a 2016-2017 ACI Artist-in-Residence at Arts Connect International. Andrea received their BA in Theatre Studies from Emerson College, and Ed.M. in the Arts in Education from The Harvard Graduate School of Education.
valeria ruelas
Valeria Ruelas is a Xicana witch born in Delicias, Chihuahua and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They are a non binary womyn of color, currently based out of Cambridge, MA. At Tufts University, Valeria received their degree in American Studies where they explored Xicanx thought and art. They consider their painting style unconventional, as they don’t like to follow any rules of composition and paint without source images. Painting, for Valeria, is the way they exist freely and without borders. They believe that through the use of painting and other media, they are able to see themselves differently, transform and heal. Originally inspired by a concept called devoradoras “womyn who devour men”, they frequently depict figures that explore identity, gender, cultural shame and violence. Playing with words and symbols allows for Valeria to tell intimate stories and destruct machismo. Every painting has a story. Valeria is also a writer, serpent and burlesque dancer. Their work can be seen on Instagram @tufavoritoveneno and @tufavoritoveneno_art
WHITNEY P. LOPEZ
Whitney P. Lopez is a gender non-conforming/nonbinary trans scholar, multimedia artist, designer, and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent.
maireth
Maireth is from Honduras, but she is currently in México. She misses her child very much, whom she left back in her country. She likes to take photographs, and hopes that many people can see them and be moved by them.
barbara jakelin
Barbara is a migrant from Honduras. She is currently in México, in the middle of her migratory journey to the United States. She has had to walk much of the way, and she has suffered a lot, but she is stong and resislient. She wants to spread awareness about what refugees go through.
The Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2009, Brandon University in Manitoba appointed her as the university’s first Writer-in-Residence; as a result of this nine-month appointment, Belathar published a chapbook of poetry, The Cities I Left Behind by Radish Press. In the summer of 2010, Scirocco Drama published The TAXI Project—a collective play about exile, originally produced by PEN Canada, with Ari Belathar as lead–writer. The TAXI Project enjoyed a two-week run at Alchemy Theatre in Toronto (2008), and toured high schools and community centres in ten southern Ontario cities and municipalities. Belathar’s work has been awarded support by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. In 2012 she was selected as Alameda Theatre Company’s Playwright in Residence (2012-2013 Toronto), as well as being invited to be part of Cahoots Theatre Playwrights’ HotHouse Writing Unit.
In the fall of 2013 she was among 27 internationally acclaimed artists that took part in The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency program to the North Pole. A Blue Mountain Center alumna, Ari Belathar now lives and writes in Cambridge, MA and is the 2016-2017 Poetry Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston.
Ari Belathar is a Mexican poet and playwright in exile. Between 1994 and 2001, she facilitated
creative writing and popular theatre workshops for indigenous women and children throughout
Mexico. She was also a founding member of the first Mexican community radio station during
the student strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1999. After being
kidnapped and tortured by the Mexican National Army in 2001 due to her work as a student
activist and independent journalist, she escaped to Canada as a political refugee.
When she arrived in Toronto, she didn’t have a passport, didn’t know anybody in the entire
country, and didn’t speak English. All she had were four dollars and a suitcase full of books...
Belathar learnt English as an autodidact, without ever taking a single ESL class.
A winning-artist participant in Artscape’s Gibraltar Point International Artists Residency
Program, she has published poetry in literary journals and anthologies around the world.
Belathar served as Writer-in-Residence through PEN Canada’s Writers in Exile Network at the
University of Windsor in 2006. That same year, she took part in the Wired Writing Studio at
ari belathar
gaybryel-emery arzola
Gaybryel is a transgender youth of color who was born and raised in Chicago Illinois and moved out to San Diego California when he was 13. Gaybryel identifies as a genderfluid, asexual and panromantic person. To him, being genderfluid means that his gender fluidly moved around. Being asexual to him means that he is not sexually attracted to anyone regardless of their gender. His panromantic identity to him means that although he is not sexually attracted to anyone, he can be romantically attracted to anyone regardless of their gender.
michelle favin
Michelle is a half-Korean, Queer artist exploring identity and the moments, movements, and memories that move her.
jae rodriguez
raven stubbs
bashezo
No Blacks, No Fats, No Femmes... Bashezo (2016)... My work, in general, tries to unpack complicated interpersonal relationships of people of color within LGBTQIA subcultures and dominant cultures in the U.S.. I examine spectrums of violence enacted upon marginalized bodies and their manifestations. They range in span from nuanced micro-aggressions to explicit forms of hyper-aggressive acts. I also critique some of core sociocultural values that are often used to justify them. No Blacks, No Fats, No Femmes represents my visceral and emotional response to the sexual racism, sizeism, and misogyny often found on gay male hook up sites here in the U.S. as well as sites around the globe. For some participants on these sites, racial and ethnic groups are easily reduced to loaded statements like “no chocolate, no rice, no curry” under the supposed benign guise of “sexual preferences”. Preferences like these demonstrate some of the ways we enact violence upon one another and the No Blacks, No Fats, No Femmes installation illustrates one of the excruciating repercussions of this type of violence and abjection.
Jae Rodriguez is a queer non-binary trans artist of color. They examine group identity and contested histories through poetry, drawing, video, and performance.