Categories: Craft, Teaching Artist, Traditional Arts, Visual Arts, Community Arts
Nicole America Cruz discovered her voice in the arts through her community’s ability to grow resilient over the challenges of systemic oppression, low resources, and poverty. She mirrors her environment through her own art making, as she uses portraiture to combat the fear of taking up space as an Afro-Latina woman, alongside the desire to hold on to child-like wonder as a result of growing up too fast due to struggle. She often uses self-portraiture, with an emphasis on hair and the afro, to celebrate a physical component of her identity that she once tried to hide. She is able to depict untraditional experiences with the traditional mediums that she learned how to use during her undergraduate studies at CUNY Queens College. Her passion for the arts took her down the path of becoming a Teaching Artist, where she works primarily with young adults at a non-profit in the Bronx. Here, she cultivated and implemented lesson plans with a focus on collaboration, community, and identity.
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