Biography

Born: San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic (1986)
Lives: Brooklyn, New York and Providence, Rhode Island

I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic in the first generation after the Trujillo dictatorship. Architecture, to me, meant two cinder block rooms with an unattached kitchen and an outhouse in the back, all under tin roofs. I did not envision how drastically my concept of the built environment would change after my family immigrated to New York City. Suddenly architecture meant a dense urban fabric of colossal brick towers – all clad in advertisements clad in graffiti. My art and design both investigate the imprint of the citizen in the 21st century city.

I am currently a Masters of Architecture candidate at the Rhode Island School of Design where I am also taking fine art studios in painting, printmaking and digital media. Because much of my upbringing was in the South Bronx, my only exposure to art as a child was graffiti, a visual language that grew out of a suppressed culture.

The natural evolution of graffiti was the more conceptual (yet equally as elusive) practice of street art which brought new meaning to the way we perceive the public realm. The desire to increase the dialogue between art and architecture combined with the need to dissolve boundaries in the art world led me to start Curbs and Stoops; A curatorial think-tank here: www.curbsandstoops.com.