Rocio Cabrera’s Artwork Lets Black Women Be Bizarre and Great | Interview

ALLURE: I consider your fashion as reaching out to our internal baby and the issues we needed to rock after we have been youthful, however mixed with political statements. Like, “this may be cute,” and in addition, “fuck the police.”

RC: There was part of me in faculty that was going again to “you might want to be taken severely,” and the issues that I am speaking about in my artwork are very fucking severe. But it surely’s nonetheless me. Rainbows and stars and regardless of the hell they’re, they’ll nonetheless make as massive of a press release. I do not wish to put myself in a field or really feel like I am making cutesy shit that does not matter. It does matter to me how I am expressing myself. I am all the time gonna be fucking a bit of indignant and pissed off [in my art] due to the product of me being a Black girl, simply residing right here in America. That’s all the time going to be within the background.

A whole lot of my creativity comes from a spot of hysteria or melancholy. Or, like, actually excessive highs. I can not create once I’m simply feeling super-fucking regular. When your creativity or your material is coming from a darkish place, you even have to search out the power, whether or not you are impressed or not.

ALLURE: If cash wasn’t an object, what would you will have for Rocio Artwork?

RC: I really feel like deep down inside I actually wish to stunt. I actually wish to spend cash, and I am attempting to work on it, however there is a wealthy girl trapped inside me. So, apart from shopping for issues for myself, I might actually like Rocio Artwork to be an empire. I’d like to make pink-rhinestone fridges, funky couches, and shag fucking wallpaper. I [have] imagined so many issues and I’ve come to a spot in my profession the place I want to begin pondering [about the] greater image and making these steps.

ALLURE: The artwork world can typically be very white and male-centered. As a Dominican American, and a lady, are you afraid that folks will see your identification first and your artwork second?

RC: My final interview, I used to be requested how my intersectionality and my identification mirror by way of my items, and I needed to sit there and give you a solution. Being this Black woman is represented in my work, and it was like, “Yo, my work’s nearly me. And it is naturally going to incorporate my identification — I can not run away from that.” However that isn’t the thesis of my artwork. So it makes me query myself. It is like, “Yo, are you even making something of actual worth for those who aren’t saying these grand issues about everyone else who seems to be such as you?”