Stephanie Mercedes

ARtist-in-residence / September 27 - december 5, 2023

Mercedes is a uncategorized Queer Latinx artist who choreographs large scale performances and installations based in sound. Mercedes transforms weapons into musical installations and works of art. She also excavates missing violent histories. Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art. She has been funded by George Soro's Open Society Foundation, Light Works, NALAC, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, Washington Project for the Arts, The DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, the GLB Memorial Foundation, the Warhol Foundation, and the Clarvit Fellowship. Mercedes has been an artist-in-residence at: VisArts, Halcyon Art Labs, the Bronx Museum, Montgomery College, Christopher Newport University, SOMA, Lugar a Dudas, Largo das Artes and La Ira de Dios. Mercedes is producing an Opera with CulturalDC in 2022-23.

Learn more about Mercedes’ work at www.stephaniemercedes.com

RESIDENT PROJECT: QUEER ALTARS Project by Stephanie Mercedes

The Queer Altars Project seeks to create meaningful spaces of remembrance, healing, and agency for DC's LGBTQIA+ community in response to gun violence and its reverberating impact. From October 2023 through September 2024, Mercedes is creating a large altar which will then be on public display this summer, as well as creating smaller altars dedicated and gifted to families who lost LGBTQIA+ family members to gun violence. These smaller wall reliefs will be portraits of their loved ones and will be cast in bullet or gun-melting ceremonies. In our city, few rituals make space for mourning loved ones lost to gun violence, especially for the LGBTQIA+ community. Gun violence is deeply traumatic and related to systematic violence beyond individual control. In these ceremonies, participants will be invited to drop a bullet casing or gun parts into the furnace, witnessing the object of violence transform into molten liquid and then recast into a new form of art. This moment aims to be an act of agency for the participants, symbolizing their ability to transform violence into art. The Queer Altars Project is supported by a Community Grant from the Mayor's Office of LGBTQ Affairs.

Interested in becoming our next artist-in-residence?