Identity and Body was born out of urgency: to gather, recognize, and validate the work of Dominican artists who have chosen printmaking as a medium of resistance, expression, and critical thought. This practice—one of the oldest in human history and essential to the development of Western visual culture—has been systematically marginalized in the Dominican Republic. There is no open-access printmaking studio in the country where artists can train outside of traditional academic frameworks. Those who pursue this discipline do so informally or through institutional training that often lacks the technical rigor demanded by the medium.
It is within this structural and pedagogical vacuum that this exhibition arises as a collective gesture. What began as a small call among Dominican artists in New York soon expanded to include participants from Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe, bringing together over 40 visual artists. The goal was clear: to foster a dialogue between print and literature, with each artist interpreting a text written by a Dominican woman writer, regardless of generation or place of residence. What emerged was a multidisciplinary, transnational proposal—a constellation of images generated by bodies that are insular, migrant, rooted, or in transit, yet all deeply engaged with the question of identity.
The result is the largest exhibition of Dominican printmaking inspired by national literature ever presented. Over 40 texts, read, visually translated, and transformed by more than 40 artistic visions. What the viewer will find here is not only a conversation between image and word, but an array of interpretations that move across the figurative, the symbolic, the abstract, and the gestural. Some works depict the texts literally; others delve into their conceptual core, filtered through the imagination of each artist; still others dissolve narrative altogether into plastic structures where the body becomes territory, map, and open-ended question.
The body, as Merleau-Ponty proposed, is not an object we inhabit, but our first way of knowing the world. And in this collective experience, the body is also a border, a wound, an archive, a language. Identity, in turn—as understood by Bourdieu—is not something we possess, but something we embody through the habitus: a set of gestures, postures, speech patterns, and movements inherited from our environment and radically transformed when we are pushed to inhabit other territories. The migrant body carries not only memory, but also a grammar, a way of being and perceiving that clashes with new cultural codes. That is where identity is rewritten—in friction, contradiction, in the tension between who we were, who we are, and who we hope to become.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the most valuable contributions come only from the diaspora. Among the artists living on the island—through their daily lives and proximity to the social, political, and symbolic realities of the local—we also find powerful, complex, and deeply contemporary reflections on body and identity. From there emerge graphic proposals full of clarity, risk, and formal beauty that, alongside the voices of the diaspora, enrich the diversity of interpretations present in this exhibition.
This initiative has also been a source of discovery. We have witnessed the emergence of a young generation deeply interested in printmaking—not out of technical nostalgia, but from a genuine desire to explore new visual discourses. In their hands, printmaking is not merely line, ink, and pressure; it is a living tool for thinking about the political, the bodily, the symbolic. We’ve seen a proliferation of languages that oscillate between the purely technical and the experimental, between tradition and disruption. And with it, a new Dominican figuration—gestural, conceptual, and deeply engaged with its time.
We believe Dominican printmaking is at a critical juncture. This collective endeavor has shown that what is lacking is not talent or ideas, but platforms, networks, and training spaces. Printmaking can reclaim its rightful place—not as an obsolete technique, but as fertile ground for contemporary visual thought.
Identity and Body is not just an exhibition: it is a commitment, a declaration, an invitation to look forward, with the certainty that a new Dominican image is taking shape in the pressure of each plate, in the ink that clings, in the body that resists.
Ezequiel Taveras
Curator
