The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) presents Amy Bravo: Some Bullheaded Girls, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition. Through surreal, assemblage compositions, Bravo explores ideas around inheritance, memory, and biography. Fusing family history and mythology, she creates deeply personal works that question and reinterpret the stories passed on to her. The artist’s paintings, drawings and sculptures take shape as symbolic portraits, invoking the psychic impact of generational conflict and connection. 

Bravo’s rich visual language is informed by her family’s past, including her grandparents’ life as cattle ranchers in Cuba, a place she is culturally tied to yet geographically distant from. In slowly unfolding, dreamlike narratives, she envisions a fictionalized bucolic Cuban landscape where queer female warriors and family archetypes converge with deities from the Afro-Caribbean Santería religion. Bravo’s figures are presented with a profusion of motifs. References to boxing, her father’s highschool sport, and rooster- and bull-headed figures symbolize defiance and stubbornness. These are traits the artist shares with the patriarchal members of her family across generations. She highlights these traits in her work as a means to move through the world with more power. For Bravo, her practice of storytelling has offered her a way to reflect on, in her words, how “machismo is inherited and alchemized into empowerment when wielded by the feminine.” 

This exhibition presents a group of new works made during Bravo’s recent residency at ISCP. Inspired by memories of her grandparents’ home, she transforms the gallery into an uncanny domestic interior. Bravo conflates past and present in these works as she points to the fragmented and imprecise nature of ancestral histories.

Born in New Jersey, Bravo is a New York-based artist from a Cuban and Italian family. Her work combines symbolism from Cuban culture with hyper-personal stories to create her own vision of a queer afterlife universe. She has exhibited work at Semiose Gallery, Paris; Swivel Gallery, New York; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, among other venues. Her work will be featured in an upcoming group exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Bravo is a recipient of The New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund Residency at ISCP. 

Amy Bravo: Some Bullheaded Girls is curated by Melinda Lang, ISCP’s Director of Programs and Exhibitions. It is supported by The New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund Artist; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Hartfield Foundation; James Rosenquist Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Council District 34; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; van Beuren Charitable Foundation; William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and Woodman Family Foundation.

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Accessibility information: Please note that the entrance to ISCP has seven steps and a ramp, which is ADA compliant. There are seven artist studios and one exhibition space which can be accessed on the first floor of ISCP. There is an accessible bathroom on the first floor at the end of the hallway, up one step, where the artist studios are located. To access the second floor there is a staircase with a grab bar installed on the right side with 22 steps. The second floor has 22 artist and curator studios, one exhibition space, and a lounge where remarks by our guest speaker will take place. To access the third floor there is a staircase with a grab bar installed on the right side with 24 steps. The third floor has five artist and curator studios. ISCP  can access a freight elevator to bring visitors between the first and second floors on request.

ISCP can offer two reserved parking spaces on request for people with disabilities. Please email programs@iscp-nyc.org to request a parking space and/or freight elevator usage.