Diana Vélez

Artist Statement

I create mixed-media artwork that brings historical memory into consciousness and invites viewers to grapple with the complexities of the histories I explore, particularly the histories of the Dominican Republic and the United States as they intersect with my experience of holding Dominican and American identities. As an artist of the Dominican diaspora, I am interested in how colonization, resistance, migration, and cultural memory continue to inform contemporary lived experience. My practice asks how events ripple across time, how the past remains present, how its effects are inherited, and how those reverberations may shape what comes next. I do not approach history as fixed, but as something that continues to unfold through memory, interpretation, and the ways we carry the past within us.

Materials are central to how I investigate these questions. I work with watercolor, acrylic, India ink, colored pencil, and materials beyond traditional art-making tools, choosing them in response to the conceptual and emotional needs of each artwork. Their physical qualities, associations, and histories become part of the work's meaning. In my work depicting the Mirabal sisters, from the Muñecas sin Rostros: Dominican Matriarchs series, I incorporate beans because of their associations with nourishment, labor, domestic life, sustenance, and survival. Within works addressing the sisters and their resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship, this familiar material takes on another dimension. The everyday and the historical exist together, creating tension between ordinary life and political violence.

At other times, I work without beginning from a predetermined image or subject. In my process paintings, I use barbed wire as a mark-making tool, allowing its associations with restriction, boundaries, violence, and division to enter the work in unexpected ways. Repetitive mark-making and layering become a meditative practice, creating space for reflection and personal integration while allowing accumulated gestures, colors, and textures to develop without a predetermined outcome. These works engage my interest in what can emerge when conscious intention gives way to discovery.

I am often surprised by what emerges through art making. While my work is informed by research and intention, I leave room for the materials, images, and forms to reveal relationships I had not anticipated. This occurred while creating El Mensajero Polinizando Entre la Tempestad (The Messenger Pollinating Amidst the Tempest). While sketching a hummingbird with a sharpie, I cut out the figure as part of the process. When I turned the cutout over, an unexpected ancestral presence appeared in the form of a ghostly figure that I had neither planned nor consciously intended to create. It felt as though something already held within me had surfaced through the act of making. I began to think of the encounter as an emergence from an unconscious or collective archive. I already knew of the hummingbird's significance within Taíno cosmology, making its emergence especially striking. The experience prompted me to consider how cultural memory, ancestral presence, and knowledge can persist and reappear through the creative process.

For me, making art is both investigation and discovery. Whether researching history, transforming an everyday material, or entering a meditative process of mark-making, I remain attentive to what the work may reveal. I hope viewers encounter these layers and, like me, grapple with what they might mean, what they may reveal about what has been carried forward, and how what we make of the past may shape what comes next.