Artist’s Bio

Aurora Levins Morales (1954-) is a Puerto Rican Ashkenazi feminist writer, visual artist and liberationist. She is the author of nine books, most recently The Story of What is Broken is Whole: An Aurora Levins Morales Reader (2024, Duke University Press), selected poetry, essays, prose poetry and fiction spanning a fifty year career. She received multiple arts grants for her book Rimonim: Ritual Poetry of Jewish Liberation (2024, Ayin Press).

Born in Puerto Rico, Levins Morales spent most of her adult life in the US, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. She returned to her childhood home in Maricao, Puerto Rico in late 2019, bringing her custom non-toxic tiny house with her.

Levins Morales is considered a major voice in US Latina literature, Women of Color feminism, diasporic Jewish culture and the field of chronic illness/disability scholarship and art. Her work appears in dozens of anthologies and publications, has been translated into seven languages and is widely taught, but until recently, her visual art remained a private practice.

She received her first visual art/poetry residency at A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans in early 2024 and launched a second arts career in digital collage.

She lives in Indiera Baja, Maricao, where she writes, makes art, gardens and stewards 34 acres of rain forest alongside her dog Luna.

She is a community supported artist through her Patreon platform, https://www.patreon.com/c/auroralevinsmorales. You can learn more about Aurora’s work at https://www.auroralevinsmorales.com

Artist’s Statement

I started making collages at thirteen, during the cultural and ecological shock of my family’s migration from rural Puerto Rico to Chicago. Collage helped me turn an experience of fragmentation into portraits, mythologies and landscapes that restored a sense of wholeness.

Although writing has been my primary and widely public art form, collage has influence my writing style, and my early affinity has evolved through years of collage journaling and crafting personal talismans, into an intentionally digital professional collage practice.

My choice of digital collage reflects my reality as a person with chronic joint pain, living in tiny house in a remote subtropical rain forest community where there are no second hand stores to source old magazines and books, and humidity and insect life can ruin paper in a matter of days. So it’s an art form particularly suited to me.

Working digitally is also a choice to democratize my art. Digital collage, which is just as technically and creatively complex as analog artwork, can be easily shared across distances and borders, shown in multiple places at once, projected onto walls, used as performance backdrops, and be broadcast internationally through popular channels. It can also be shared in poster form, published in books and turned into limited edition museum quality prints like the ones I offer here. My limited edition series are printed on banana leaf paper, expressing my ecological commitments, Caribbean identity and subject matter through their material form.

Themes, Practices and Current Projects

I am interested in the complex interactions of ecology, history, culture and the human body as well as a wide range of social justice issues. My art making is all about layering, which is not only a technique I love, but also an organic way of representing Caribbean sensibilities, arising from the richly layered histories and cultures of our region. In this way they resist colonial narratives of simplicity in tropical paradise.

For each piece, I start with a story seed, then begin gathering information and images, responding intuitively to colors and patterns, representation of people and places, emotional depth and inner resonance. I lay down a stack of images that I blend, fade, merge, selectively erase, make translucent and transform in Photoshop. I try out combinations, move the order of the layers, turn layers on and off to see what works best, and throw out what doesn’t, starting with too much, and editing down to the essential. Some images have just a couple of main images, with perhaps a few background layers (“Ictal”) while others may have twenty or more (“Gestation”).

I am currently collaborating with my brother Ricardo Levins Morales on an adult picture book of my poem Red Sea, with collage based primarily on fragments of his artwork. In the traditions of Puerto Rican printmaking and Jewish book arts, my book collages integrate narrative text into the imagery itself.

As an invited researcher at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, I’m also creating portraits of Caribbean Jews as part of a collaborative investigation and developing a series that blends personal and broadly social aspects of my own chronic illnesses, including epilepsy and diabetes as part of a STEM to STEAM initiative, integrating art into the study of science and technology.

Ferment

Many of the images in this gallery come from my multi-genre project, Ferment, which explores the impact of “chemicals of control” starting with my own pesticide-induced epilepsy and expanding into a global story of military and agricultural toxicity. My work, in words or in visual art, never documents the terrible without offering some medicine for it. In this case, it’s an immersion into microbiology and the beneficial bacteria that can bioremediate everything from the pesticide dieldrin, to plastic waste, to the residues of war.