ARTISTS

Priscilla Aleman

YoungArts Residency (2023)

In A Field of Ancient Stars

Priscilla Aleman is a visual artist based between New York and Miami.  A YoungArts Presidential Scholar in 2009, Aleman completed her BFA at Cooper Union and later completed an MFA in Sculpture at Columbia University. Upon graduating she continued her art practice in Miami, working with archaeologists, conducting an intimate investigation of South Florida’s relationship to the Tropics and the Latin American landscape. With this understanding of past traditions and the environmental history of the Americas,  Aleman crafts her own sanctified installations:deified sculptural monuments and memorials. Aleman has recently exhibited works with the Wave Hill Project Space, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,YoungArts, and Upstate Art Weekend, among others She was recently commissioned for a public artwork by the New York Botanical Garden, was an Artist in Residence at FountainHead and is currently an Artist in Residence on Governors Island through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Aleman has received numerous awards, including the Bronx Museum’s AIM Fellowship and the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Fellowship, and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Miami Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs. 

With my background in archaeology, I use sculpture and collage to retrace ideas around the body as a vessel, the afterlife, pre-Columbian cosmology, and the interplay of cultures from the global south. My Miami upbringing guides my work to better understand landscapes’ past traditions and their histories. Citing the ocean as a connective tissue, I join materials that have resonance in both personal and historic senses, collected from regions throughout the Americas and Caribbean, to engage with historic and imagined depictions of diasporic civilizations. Through wayfinding, I incorporate a multitude of deep field research and work to push the process of re-contextualizing old and new worlds. My later arrangement of these materials in installations puts me in the position of a collector, creator, analyst, believer, and practitioner. With this method, I bring to life my own parallel and intersecting universes in process and form.