Instructions For A Future: Conversation with Amaryllis R. Flowers

Nine years after our first conversation on Broken Boxes Podcast, I got to circle back with one of my besties, and the incredible artist now known as Amaryllis R. Flowers. Amaryllis works across materials from drawing to video, to performance to clay, creating a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there. It was a warm early summer day and we sat outside in the clover fields at the Rockefeller Brothers Estate in New York where Amaryllis was an artist in residence at the Pocantico Center. In our conversation, Amaryllis reflects on her journey in claiming and reframing what the term Artist can mean, how it can evolve. She gives us a glimpse into the adventures and miseducation of the formal art school path and how her experiences in academia have had lasting effects on her life and practice, both positive and negative. Amaryllis takes some time to speak vulnerably about mental health and how stigmatized certain diagnoses still are in our society. She shares her own path of healing over the past few years and provides tangible resources and support systems she has gleaned in finding wellness. We speak to her current experience of reclaiming her way as Artist, as she reforms a more balanced and generative relationship with her practice and the artworld. Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Drawing inspiration from visual systems of communication such as comics, cartoons, codices, Egyptian scrolls, sympathetic magic, Caribbean Surrealisms, and alchemical diagrams for transformation, Amaryllis  creates non-linear symbol sets that buck colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Where taste has been constructed by these notions, she aims to create work of questionable taste, utilizing color and material classed as “femme” and casting it to the center of the circle. Illuminated with fluorescents, metallics, and iridescence, these images refuse a naturalizing aesthetic of the universe.Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco). https://www.amaryllisartist.comFeatured Song: Goin’ Looney by Big Freedia