Michelle Ivette Gomez

Descripción del Artista

Michelle Ivette Gomez is an independent curator, arts organizer, creative consultant, and artist originally from Miami, FL, where she graduated from the prestigious New World School of the Arts (NWSA) high school in 2008. In 2012, she received her B.F.A. in General Fine Arts with a concentration in Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD. Shortly after, she graduated with her M.F.A. in Curatorial Practice from MICA in 2014. She is the recipient of numerous honors and academic awards, including the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Merit Scholarship, the Fanny B Thalheimer Merit Scholarship, and was named a 2015 Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Scholar through Alternate Roots. Gomez has produced many independent curatorial projects and programs in Baltimore and Miami. She founded and directed Young Blood, an annual exhibition in Miami that showcased alumni from NWSA, has served on the Program Advisory Committee at Maryland Art Place, was a 2013 Latino museum Studies Program Fellow at the Smithsonian Latino Center and Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, and was named a 2014-2015 fellow of the Urban Arts Leadership Program through the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. When she is not curating, Gomez enjoys making autobiographical artwork using a wide variety of media, most recently focusing on digital photography. Her artwork has been featured in group art exhibitions throughout Miami, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Psychology, gender, family, and cultural identity are subjects of her artwork and past curatorial projects. During her Graduate studies in Curatorial Practice at MICA in Baltimore, she researched socially engaged art and arts activism, conducted community sourced research, and expanded traditional methods of exhibition presentation in collaboration with communities and artists of color who are under represented within the arts to create exhibitions and programs about spirituality, cultural identity, and community. Those projects inspired Gomez to solely focus her efforts on facilitating Community | Art | Exhibitions, a series of exhibitions and programs as well as a philosophy and methodology in which she works collaboratively with under represented artists and audiences to inform and create relevant and accessible exhibitions about community, cultural identity, social issues, and more. Recent Community | Art | Exhibitions include CONGREGATE art + faith + community, which created shared experiences for faith-based congregations and artistic communities co-curated by the Curatorial Practice class of 2014, Devociones y Fe (Devotions and Faith), an exhibition of objects, artworks, and interviews about Latino spiritual traditions and how those traditions create a sense of belonging, Estamos Aquí (We Are Here), a guerilla public art project that projected the portraits and stories about Baltimore’s Latino community leaders on the side of a building, and Cutz: Black Men in Focus, a photography and video exhibition by artist Gracie Xavier that explored Black Male identity through the lens of the African American barbershop at Gallery CA in Baltimore, MD. Michelle Ivette Gomez recently moved back to Miami, FL where she continues to work as an independent curator, arts organizer, and creative consultant with the hopes of promoting dialogue and action around arts activism in the Miami arts community, and bringing Community | Art | Exhibitions to her own native hometown. (This biography was updated in April of 2016)