Grace Rosario Perkins Brings Native, Queer and Gender Identities Into a Multidisciplinary Practice

Grace Rosario Perkins is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Painting is at the center of her practice, but her work also includes video installations and masks. Across those forms, she explores the intersections of her Native American, queer and gender identities.

Perkins was born in Santa Fe in 1986. Her mother is Diné, and her father is Akimel O’odham from the Gila River Indian Community. Her upbringing included time in Oakland, around the Gila River and in the Navajo Nation. Those locations and family connections are part of the background to an artistic practice that engages identity through more than one medium.

Before pursuing art history, Perkins earned a General Education Development certificate. She later studied Art History at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland. Her path into art also included an early connection to comics: a store beside her high school introduced her to books that inspired her to make art for herself.

Perkins’s work has received recognition through nominations for several opportunities and awards. They include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award, a United States Arts Fellowship, a Tosa Studio Award and a Liquitex Painter’s Residency. The nominations place her painting and broader artistic work within a range of contemporary arts programs, while her practice remains rooted in personal and cultural questions.

In addition to her individual work, Perkins is a member of the Black Salt Collective. That collective practice sits alongside her painting, video installations and masks, giving her more than one setting in which to develop her ideas.

For Albuquerque’s LGBTQ community, Perkins’s work offers a local example of an artist whose practice does not separate queer identity from other parts of lived experience. Her art brings together Native American, queer and gender perspectives rather than treating them as unrelated subjects. Her connection to Albuquerque is also part of the city’s cultural landscape: she is not only associated with the area through a project or appearance, but is identified as an artist who lives and works there.

Perkins’s biography traces a route from Santa Fe and the communities that shaped her upbringing to formal art study and a varied professional practice. In Albuquerque, that practice continues through painting and other forms, with identity, heritage and creative experimentation remaining central to how her work is described.

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Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://moca-tucson.org/exhibition/grace-rosario-perkins/ - https://www.macalester.edu/gallery/pastexhibits/2018-19/material-futurity-2/ - https://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Artists-carving-out-space-for-women-of-color-in-6762743.php - https://vimeo.com/210267752 - https://www.natbrut.com/grace-rosario-perkins - https://www.kqed.org/arts/13919766/grace-rosario-perkins-hermits-lamp-cushion-works Image rights Photograph description: Maria Luís Albuquerque Creator: Frédéric Garrido-Ramirez. License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AVisit_of_Maria_Lu%C3%ADs_Albuquerque%2C_to_the_College_of_Europe_(Bruges)_(P-070521-00-28).jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.