Charo Oquet

As a child growing up in the Dominican Republic, Charo’s family had to move yearly from one city of the D.R. to another due to her dad’s job as a high ranking military officer and the dictator’s paranoia. The artist spent much of her youth filling her notebooks with drawings. “No one would notice,” says Charo. When her family was exiled to the U.S.A., Charo’s 4^th grade art teacher noticed her skills and Charo quickly became the go-to classroom artist. Despite hardly being able to speak English, she excelled in school. When forced to move yet again back to the D.R. at  age 16, now with a heavy Nuyorican accent, Art yet again helped her survive an environment in which the artist felt deeply out of place. “Art is my identity and my way of approaching the world,” says Oquet. As a multi-disciplinary artist fluent in various media, her work ranges painting, installation and sculpture. Shifting mediums often helps her shift blocks. At the moment, she’s diving back into ceramics after a couple decades away from the beloved medium. Her work is about new narratives and subjectivities, historical contexts being addressed today that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities. “I prefer to work with people and their habits, symbols, and social rituals. My practice yielded a body of work thoroughly informed by the anthropological and ethnographic gaze I cast on Western society in general, and Afro-Caribbean society in particular inspired by my own Dominican background,” explains Charo. Folk or “popular” culture attracts the artist for the way that it combines wit, inventiveness, and creativity in unique ways distinguishable from mass culture. Grappling with narratives of decolonization, her work traverses performance and community engagement at times. Charo embraces tension, the carnivalesque and the grotesque — often intentionally confronting the viewer with “his or her own relationship to popular culture and chaos seeking to heighten the experience of the spectator by creating immersive environments that transport the viewer into other worlds.” Exploring the culture of Voodoo, for instance, “engenders unresolved racist issues, anxiety, [and] anger that is repressed or denied.” Through highlighting these issues, Charo urges her viewers to engage consciously. She feels that engendering a better understanding of the art and religious forms of black, working class culture “without fear or shame,” enables “a deeper understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of one’s social identity.” Charo makes work both at home in South Beach and out of her studio in Allapattah, Miami. Charo is an official selection featured artist in this April’s Habana Biennial.