Amy Bravo
Amy Bravo is a Cuban/Italian American painter & maker located in Brooklyn, New York.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
My work always begins with drawing, not sketching or creating studies, but physically drawing onto the surface. The figure is essential and almost always comes first. The world is built around them, they ultimately control the space. The color is a layering process. In drawing, I rely on wax pastels, building in a deeper color first, around the graphite, then dulling it out with a pale yellow or beige, like sunlight is sucking all the color out of the image, maybe it’s fading away, or still being developed.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on several large scale painted works that utilize collaged canvasses, and I’m also beginning to make some sculptural altarpieces that combine painting, sculpture and video.
Although two drawings were selected for The Alternative States, we noticed that your practice spans multiple mediums and materials. Can you talk about your use of mixed materials? In particular, we love The Two Bravos, which is kind of like a hybrid sculpture painting.
Garden, 2020.
Wax pastel and embroidery on paper and canvas.
51 x 46 inches.
It’s very rare that I make a work in only one medium. I was a sketchbook kid growing up, always cutting and collaging and combining highlighter, pen, glitter, pressed flowers, anything that glue or tape could hold down. I get really attached to found textures and objects, sometimes they’re quicker to communicate something deeper about what the work means than traditional drawing or painting is. My mother is a collector of craft materials and trinkets, she teaches art to young children. Her garage is like a store of materials she’s been donated over the years, and I raid it a lot. I like an object with history, even better if it’s directly from my home. The Two Bravos was made when I was staying with my parents for a few months of early quarantine. I had one stretched canvas in their house, which I hated using, so I had to flip it over to be able to tolerate it. I was working on some small retablos at the time. At some point, the two ideas combined, and the painting had to become a big retablo, it had to grow legs and become some weird, sacred thing. It’s about my relationship with my late abuelita, which is itself a weird, sacred thing.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
That’s incredibly challenging to narrow down, I think the art you end up making is just the thing that sits on top of a massive pile of references you didn’t even realize you were cataloguing. In terms of tangible references, I’d say the writing of Reinaldo Arenas is a big deal to me, as well as “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity” by José Esteban Muñoz and Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces”. Visually, I’m a huge fan of Belkis Ayon, Kerry James Marshall and Ida Applebroog. I’m interested in converging queer aesthetics and pastoral aesthetics, pastoral aesthetics and island aesthetics. I come from many generations of Cuban farmers, but didn’t have a particularly rural or Cuban upbringing. There’s a mysticism around the farm for me, and particularly the island farm. It’s still mesmerizing to see a chicken beside a palm tree. I’m also gay, which doesn’t really fit into the traditional language of pastoralism. Of course, Cuban/American relations are a part of my work, as a critic of the embargo, and a self-identified socialist living among a very conservative Cuban American population. The work forms out of a lack of physical experience of the island my family comes from, and a feeling of not belonging in the greater Cuban American community. The space that forms is sort of a nowhere space that seeks to resolve the insufficient cultural experience I have in relation to Cuba.
Santera.
Acrylic and wax pastel on canvas.
57 x 70 inches.
Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence has that changed?
The Drawing Center is almost always great, and surprising. Also a big fan of the Leslie-Lohman Museum.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I have a few fun things I have to keep quiet right now, but I’ll be showing with Grove Collective in London this fall, and sending some work over to SWAB Barcelona Art Fair with Selena’s Mountain.
Brittany Miller’s work is included in our show “The Alternative States,” May 3 - June 30, 2021. Visit her Instagram (@_amybravo_) to see more of her work.