Blindfolded
2022
Awilda Sterling
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.
About Awilda Sterling
Awilda Sterling-Duprey (Puerto Rico, 1947) is a Afro Caribbean visual, installation, and performance artist. She became interested in Abstract Expressionism in the 60's through Franz Kline's Black Paintings. Conceptual Art and Dada became major influences on her visual work with Caribbean religious dance traditions. Sterling studied at Pratt Institute in the late 1970s, a time when performance had become accepted as a means of artistic expression in its own right. Sterling keeps searching and integrating her sense of Afro Caribbean-ness with an emphasis on the pictorial and the quotidian. She is a 2010 USA Artist Fellow and a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Sterling is the recipient of awards and artist's residencies including: EL Resuelve, El Serrucho (2017; 2019); Tree of Life Artists Grant (2018); El cuadrado gris (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Puerto Rico (2020); USA Artists Relief Grant (2020); and the MASS MoCA Artists Residency (Summer 2023). Her most recent practice consists of dance improvisations while drawing blindfolded (exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, 2022).
Program Participation
Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2022
Website / Social Links
In performance, I challenge the two-dimensionality of the pictorial plane through the three-dimensionality of the performative action. I am strongly driven to gesture, and perceive my body as the moving element in space and three-dimensional space as an imaginary canvas.”
