Amy Bravo plays with the heroization and a certain masculinization of some of her figures: a superheroine pulled by (flaming) roosters, warrior women planting their flag in virgin territory, mimicking an act of conquest seen so many times before, a woman becoming a rooster to decline / ward off in the same act the male ego. Appropriating the ego in order to better crush it. In Elegy of the Moustache (2024), the artist’s grandfather’s moustache, shaved off following his death, serves to expose, in a deeply erotic manner, the construction of gender and sexuality in the family’s unconscious. [...] Through the incorporation of the great narratives of domineering, white, male art history, the grand narratives of her own family history and of those from the margins of society, of American and Afro-Latin American gay and lesbian cultures, through her attempts to bring her ancestors and her own community of guerilla women onto dialog, by trying to make the Here and There coincide and finally, by attempting to depict possible bodies that are by no means incarnations of normalized social bodies, Amy Bravo has produced a body of radical drag art.

Amy Bravo is a New York based artist of Cuban Italian origin. Her works combine symbolism—stylized palm trees, roosters, horses and waxed mustaches—artifacts from Latin American religious and popular culture and family stories, to create her own intimate and imaginative vision of the island of Cuba, a mixture of the familiar and the unknown, of beauty and bewilderment.

She has an unconventional approach to painting, preferring irregular shaped canvasses to the classic stretcher forms, and mixing black and colored pencil drawings with various other disciplines such as painting and collage using materials such as string, leather, dried leaves and lace amongst other diverse objects drawn from her personal and family history. This very particular combination of techniques, where pride of place is given to DIY and popular culture, fits in perfectly with the intentions of her work: to bring together complex identities, to rebuild a family lineage interrupted by exile, to reimagine her ancestral home and to sketch the outlines of a mythical world. Thus, her works have given birth to a rural community populated by Amazons, women wrestlers and cowgirls; proud and liberated women at the crossroads of the three communities asserted by the artist: Women, Brown and Latinx.

Born in 1997 in New Jersey, Amy Bravo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from the Pratt Institute, she obtained a MFA at Hunter College in New York in 2022. Amongst recent exhibitions, she had solo shows at Galleria Pogiali, Milano, in 2024, at Nada Miami in 2022 and a duo show at Swivel Gallery, New York the same year. In 2022, she also benefitted from a residency at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami.