Mildred Beltre

An ongoing series of text based drawings and objects that re-word, abstract, and recontextualize language taken from borrowed and original text.

Installation of my work in Seen and Heard at the Everson Museum, Syracuse NY.

In celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the passage of women’s suffrage in New York State, Seen and Heard explores the use of the arts as a catalyst for social change. Artists have played key roles in social and political movements throughout history, altering the ways in which people view and think about the world. Whether performance, music, or visual, art of any medium has the power to challenge assumptions and inspire passions as nothing else can, and artists harness that power to analyze humanity, initiate tough conversations, protest injustice, and affect emotional and systematic change.

Initially inspired by Barbara Kruger’s Who Speaks? Who is Silent?, a monumental work in the Everson’s collection that addresses the implication of silence and representation for women, Seen and Heard features the work of nine contemporary artists alongside key works from the Museum’s permanent collection. Through this presentation, the exhibition considers the history of social and political activism in the arts and invites visitors to participate in a timely conversation about equal rights and civic engagement. The nine artists, Mildred Beltré, Yvonne Buchanan, Cassils, Lionel Cruet, Stella Marrs, Jessica Posner, Jessica Putnam-Phillips, Kevin Snipes, and Holly Zausner, share a passion for social equality and justice, and their work builds upon the extensive history of art as a form of activism. Working in sculpture, installation, printmaking, ceramics, photography, and video, each artist explores the language and tactics of protest in both subtle and overt ways.

Here is the wall text for my installation in this show:

Mildred Beltré is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in grassroots, social justice political movements, their associated participants, structures, and how those ideas affect social relations. The work in this gallery involves looking at political theorizing and posturing through the lens of the daily human experience. In particular, the topics in this work center around non-hierarchical, prefigurative politics.
 
In creating banners featuring sexually provocative imagery and playful double entrendrés, Beltré uses humor to ask what it means to want to create a world free of sexist, racist, capitalist, and imperialist subjectivity and what it takes to make revolution desirable. For Beltré, social change requires putting one’s own body on the line, having “skin in the game” as well as laughter, warmth, and human connection.
 

In producing agitprop that references the domestic — blankets, pillows, napkins, drawings that both employ and deploy the language of cross stitch, and quilts — Beltré questions what working toward an equitable society looks like in the midst of daily life. Political participation often means taking to the streets, but Beltré is interested in how that happens in the intimate space of the home and the heart.

Installation shots from "The Changing Same" an exhibition at Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College, Amherst MA, 2015.  October 6-November 20, 2015

An on-going series of prints and drawings started in 2014, highlighting practitioners of the Black Radical imagination with a particular focus on   the civil rights movement in the United States.

Series of reduction woodblocks made between 2002 and 2006.

All prints are 22"x30".

The Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine
2010-Present

The Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine is a project that began when Mildred Beltre and Oasa DuVerney started making art together in each other’s apartments. As we shared stories and experiences while making our work, we wondered if we could bring a similar experience to our other neighbors. So, in the summer of 2010 we co-founded a collaborative public art project that explores art making as a community-building tool. The Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine is a community based, socially engaged project in Crown Heights Brooklyn. Dubbing ourselves the “Official Unofficial Artists in Residence” of our block, we set up tents, tables, a banner, and art supplies on the street outside our apartment building, and began working.

An Exhibition at Burlington City Arts, Burlington, Vermont April 18-June 7, 2014

Statement from the Show:

Borrowing imagery from diverse sources – West African iconography, political movements, planar geometry, plant growth, and sports – Mildred Beltré’s playful abstract constructions are metaphors for the complexity of human relationships. Her work is constantly evolving, is never polished, and is in a perpetual state of progress. As an artist and activist, imagination and the ability to dream are fundamental to Beltré’s artistic process. Dreams cannot be realized with the absence of imagination and our world seldom changes without actively re-envisioning social constructs. Beltré not only provides a way for us to reimagine the world we live in, she also issues us a challenge to accept the effort that inherently accompanies dreaming.