Amy Bravo, a New York visual artist of Italian-Cuban origin, combines symbolism –stylized palm trees, roosters, horses, slicked-back mustaches –icons from Latin American popular and religious culture and hyper-personal family stories, to invent her own vision, intimate and fantastic, of an afterlife universe in the rough shape of the island of Cuba. Bravo’s approach to painting is unconventional. Rather than the classic stretched canvases, she prefers loose canvas—cut and stitched together to create irregular shapes on which she mixes graphite drawing with painterly techniques and collage. The result are drawings which expand into painting, embroidery, and assemblage sculpture. This very personal combination of techniques serves to bring together complex identities, to recompose a family lineage interrupted by exile, to challenge and communicate with her ancestors and to draw the contours of a mythical world. Her works thus give birth to a rural colony populated by amazons, boxers, rooster-women, and cowgirls, proud and free figures at the crossroads of the communities claimed by the artist: Lesbian and Latin American.

Born in 1997 in Park Ridge, New Jersey, Amy Bravo currently lives and works in Queens, New York. After completing a bachelor’s degree in Illustration at Pratt Institute, New York, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Hunter College, New York in 2022. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Swivel Gallery, New York and Semiose Gallery, Paris in 2023 as well as group shows with Rachel Uffner Gallery, Workplace, and The FLAG Foundation. She was the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields grant in 2023 and was a resident at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami in 2022.

IG: @_amybravo_