ARTIST STATEMENT
Rooted in radical love and done in hopes of nurturing tenderness and vulnerability, my artwork asks viewers to come close, both in physical touch and in heart. Pulling in the many textures and stencils that exist in a life at the crossroads of several identities and communities, I focus on printmaking and collages that dare the viewer to look closely and recognize the poetry, often informed by a life on the margins as a femme of color, within it. Ghost prints are layered in the prints to mirror the ancestral wisdoms we carry and the potential to build new images and realities atop them.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ayling Zulema Dominguez (they/she) is a first-generation child of Mexican and Dominican diaspora from Bronx, New York. As a poet and creative in an abolitionist mindset, their work aims to forge community; to affirm belonging as the first step toward liberation; to imagine new, better, and more radically loving worlds. Knowing that a sense of belonging is counterfactual and ephemeral if we do not work to liberate others, their writing and creative work do not only celebrate joyful resistance, but also push readers to actively oppose systems of oppression. Ayling has been a Featured Performer, Speaker, and Radical Poetry Workshop Facilitator with organizations such as United We Dream, the Writers Guild Initiative, and Make the Road NY, as well as been awarded grants to attend Cave Canem workshops, and had the honor of being a 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow, and 2020 DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium Fellow.
They were most recently in community at The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat, and awarded the Laundromat Project Seed Grant to host poetry workshops for BIPOC caretakers in laundromats throughout the Bronx and Brooklyn. Playwriting and theater have also formed part of Ayling’s creative practice by way of partaking in the LAByrinth Intensive and the Maria Irene Fornés Playwriting Workshop. They have taught poetry and visual arts classes with public school students all throughout Brooklyn and the South Bronx. Select poems of theirs have been published in Moko Magazine, La Galería Magazine, The Protest Review, The Mujerista, 433 Magazine, Latino Rebels, The Bronx Free Press, and Alegria Magazine’s Latinx Poetry Anthology. Ayling is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
© Ayling Zulema Dominguez