Awilda Sterling-Duprey: Aesthetics of dis-order

You’re invited to NXTHVN’s Public Performance by our Visiting Artist, Awilda Sterling-Duprey.

For this performance, Sterling-Duprey will be in dialogue with local New Haven musicians providing improvisational jazz and bomba acoustics while she allows her body to feel and translate the music into rhythmic bodily movements articulated into bright pastel markings, lines, and textures onto black construction paper. This event is free and open to the public.

Registration is requested.

Join NXTHVN for a public performance with Awilda Sterling-Duprey presenting her series “…blindfolded,” where she blindfolds herself and makes abstract marks on papers in response to a musical score. For this special performance, Sterling-Duprey will be in dialogue with local New Haven and CT-based musicians providing improvisational sounds that draw from jazz and Caribbean influences. She will allow her body to feel and translate the music into rhythmic bodily movements articulated into bright pastel markings, lines, and textures onto black construction paper. Accompanying musicians include Jesse Hameen II (drums), Johnathan Moore (cello), Nelson Bello (Barril), Michael Carabello (keys), Morris Trent (bass), and Stephen Gritz King (saxophone).

Awilda Sterling-Duprey (b. 1947- San Juan, PR) is an experimental, independent, and multidisciplinary artist that works and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sterling-Duprey’s work explores identity, gender, diaspora, language, and migration, challenging conventional notions of cultural, national, and gendered boundaries. Her work intertwines marginalities of self-representation and resistance, confronting the silencing and invisibilizing of Afro-Caribbean women. Working with multidisciplinarity and feeding from Yoruba Caribbean traditions, Sterling-Duprey transgresses the boundaries between drawing, painting, and performance through a decolonizing practice that challenges conventions in Puerto Rican fine arts traditions.

She is a founding member of Pisotón, the first experimental dance collective in Puerto Rico. Recent group exhibitions include Puerto Rico Negrx, curated by Marina Reyes Franco & María Elena Ortíz, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC), San Juan, PR; no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, curated by Marcela Guerrero, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Cimarronas: artistas negras y afrodescendientes, Museo Casa Escuté, Carolina, PR; Untitled II, Kilometro 0.2, San Juan, PR.