Cristina Velásquez

Cristina Velásquez is an artist working primarily with photography and weaving. Her practice centers around an exploration of identity as a personal means of mending the historically violent and oppressive relationship she inherited with the photographic medium. Her work seeks to "decolonize," confront imposed histories and ideas, and reimagine.

Velasquez’ engagement with photography is an ongoing exercise in re-centering. Drawing from her experience as a woman, artist, mother, and Latin American immigrant, her work challenges and expands the logic of a canon (patriarchal, colonial, elitist) that has long been complicit in excluding alternative narratives, aesthetics, and perspectives from being heard. Velasquez reclaims her history and identity to resist the threats of erasure and cultural assimilation. Similarly, she reclaims photography as a medium for connection, reparation, fertile ground for critical thinking and pictorial expression.

Cristina received an MFA degree in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College and the International Center of Photography (2017). Recent recognitions include Regeneration 4, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2020); the Light Work Artist-In-Residency program (2019); the Carol Crow Fellowship (2019); and the Kris Graves Project, Lost II Book Prize (2019). Cristina's work has been shown widely including exhibitions at Musée de l’Elysée, ICP Museum, ArtBo, MoMA PS1, International Center of Photography, Houston Center for Photography, and Society for Photographic Education, in addition to being held in private and public collections. Her monographs Viterbo (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), and Montañera (self published, 2017) have been collected by Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty Institute, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, Syracuse University, ArtCenter College of Art and Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Arcadia University, Texas State University, University of Iowa, Ryerson University and George Washington University; amongst others. Cristina lives and works between Colombia and the US. She is currently a curator for New Poetics of Labor and Art Director at Paisajes Coloniales.