About the Artist
A young Afro-Carribean artist learned to “fly” through manipulating her materials. YSANEL started as a poet and became a public artist in her historic hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in the South Side of Providence alongside a large population of people from Dominican Republic, where both of her parents were born and where most of her is family is from.
Lucky for her, Providence was (and still is) entirely a melting pot of different diasporas so she learned arts & culture through both a personal and collaborative lens. She developed a voice for justice, especially racial justice and anti gun violence movements. Eventually her interdisciplinary work began to soar from public art to music, and from sculpture to theatre.Today, she experiments with a personal collection about her identity that she hopes to share in the Fall/Winter Season of 2021.
"Thinking Outside The Box" As part of their Utility Box Program, The Avenue Concept commissioned local artists to paint murals on these functional but otherwise unsightly part of our streetscape. YSANEL, who is also a poet, reflects on the experience and its impact in this video filmed and edited by Ian Travis Barnard and his team.
