Biography
The work of Andreina Fuentes Angarita, American (b. Caracas Venezuela 1968) based in Miami, proposes a critical and eloquent vision on gender and the construction of personal and collective identity. Her practice focuses on social injustice, activism, and the revision of social stereotypes.
Her training process in photography and other media has taken place through her studies at the Art Students League, New York; Roberto Mata Photography Workshop, Caracas; Nelson Garrido Organization (NGO), Caracas Photo España, Madrid.
Fuentes has spent time researching and producing proposals inspired by her personal references, class discrimination, and the concepts associated with beauty and femininity. In this way, for example, Rummie Quintero Portrait,2004 photographic series in which she seeks to explore the intimacy and the evolution of the identity of a trans woman in her home. The intention of documenting her in the context of her domestic space has to do with the idea of understanding the possible influence of her family relationship in a place of learning, physical and emotional security.
The images related to, Rummie Quintero Portrait do not show us bodily injuries or any other type of physical abuse as usually happens in countless family environments. However, what they do contain is the story of a woman who projects her femininity and professional development as a dancer by turning her home into a ballet school for children and young people to help them prevent drug use and other vices to which they are exposed in a neighborhood typified as a high-risk place due to armed groups and other social problems that provoke horror in the area.
Between 2004 and 2021, Fuentes decided to deepen her conceptual navigation map by exploring different cultures to learn about the reality of other people; in this way, she managed to connect with vulnerable women in several Latin American countries and sought to accompany specific cases due to the magnitude of the problem.
From that moment on, her work goes through the experimentation of diverse aesthetics as a way of understanding her own language and the convulsed contexts in which people live affected by violence.
In this way, we observe how during certain periods, the artist’s body of work goes through cycles of production where the images, on the one hand, seem to respond to a cheesy, vulgar, or tasteless aesthetic. On the other hand, representations emerge that embody reality without the strident accommodation of an aesthetic influence.
In perspective, Andreina Fuentes Angarita today establishes new routes to orient the coordinates of her research towards the understanding of contemporary social values and create works as a form of coverage that supports the most vulnerable and the trans community, activating civil rights that belong to an individual due to his or her citizenship status. We refer to the right to equal protection under the law and freedom without discrimination.