Recollection Painting

Bio: An acclaimed visual artist and writer, A’Driane Nieves is also the founder of an arts collective and art magazine, and U.S. Air Force veteran. Her interdisciplinary practice focuses on the epigenetic, psychological, and social-emotional impacts of trauma—inherited, historical, personal —exposing how it shapes, alters, and redefines identity over the course of our lives. Through abstract forms and composition, she gives visible shape to the internal biological and emotional processes of adaptation, recovery, healing, and transformation. She believes that creating and viewing visual art that addresses difficult topics can serve as a catalyst for personal growth & social change. In 2018 Nieves founded Tessera Arts Collective, a not-for-profit serving women and non-binary abstract artists of color. Nieves' paintings are on view at public institutions and in private collections in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Statement: My work is not representative of the external; rather about the impact of the external on our identities. It is about our Black bodies, experiences, traumas & triumphs, healing, & identities from an internal perspective. Each piece is a part of the body, psyche, and soul turned inside out; the intimate recesses, fault lines, eroded sediment, gravity wells, multitudes, & universes we contain as we navigate a society that judges us by what can be seen with the eye. If figurative, portrait, & other representative visual works of art are the organs, muscles & bones…then abstract is the marrow, the synovial fluid, the neural pathways, the central nervous system, the vitreous body through which we view and process experience. I use raw emotions, expressive marks, gestural lines, and abstract form to give name to time and place as well as the “how” and “what”. Doing so allows for an intimate, vulnerable, and honest examination of what shapes our identities over the course of our lives and drives our behaviors; conditioned and otherwise. It all comes from an intuitive, spiritual place that draws upon my own experiences from childhood to present. I have known displacement, disembodiment, and disassociation intimately as an individual, and our collective experience with each across the diaspora is encoded in my DNA. As a survivor of abuse, painting is an excavation of everything I hid in my mind and body for survival during childhood.