Artist statement
I make art to explore personal narratives, to navigate life through the material culture of the Northern American hemisphere, to raise questions about social constructs and structural inequalities, to create a platform where multiple modes of understanding can coexist, and where multiple people find meaning relevant to their own experience.
I am often interested in discarded objects and their access to memory and language, and their ability to reflect how people, just like objects, can enact dynamics proper of the discarded and derelict; informed by race, geographical origin, the social spectrum which they(we) inhabit, and the ways in which they(we) ascribe to social conventions.
Under these lens, the object’s relationship with the domestic and the social contemporary becomes a field ripe for the construction of multiple narratives adjacent, parallel, and interconnected, looking to incite in the viewer a process of reflection and interconnection.
Bio
Emilio Maldonado is a Dominican-Puerto Rican artist living in the US.
He received an AAS from Escuela de Diseño Altos de Chavón-Parsons in the Dominican Republic, a BFA from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, and an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design.
His work has been featured at group and solo shows in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the US and Germany. Some include the "Santo Domingo 23rd Modern Art Museum Biennial" (DR, 2013), “Santurce es Ley” (PR, 2010-2011), “Hyperbolic-Semiotics under Third World Standards” (US, 2015), “The Mutability of Time” (Berlin, Germany, 2022) and others. He has been a resident artist at Elsewhere Residency in Greensboro, NC (2013) and part of Mural Arts "Philadelphia Black Artists Fellowship". Named by the Philadelphia Inquirer as one of the 20 emerging black artists to watch.
Since 2017 he lives in Philadelphia, where he works as an Artist, Professor, Museum Professional and Artist Relations Director at Mural Arts Philadelphia.