Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Utilizing drawings, video, sculpture, performance and installation, her work is a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there.
Drawing inspiration from visual systems of communication such as comics, cartoons, codices, Egyptian scrolls, sympathetic magic, Caribbean Surrealisms, and alchemical diagrams for transformation, Amaryllis creates non-linear symbol sets that buck colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Where taste has been constructed by these notions, she aims to create work of questionable taste, utilizing color and material classed as “femme” and casting it to the center of the circle. Illuminated with fluorescents, metallics, and iridescence, these images refuse a naturalizing aesthetic of the universe.
Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco).