The heart of Amaryllis R. Flowers’ practice lies in storytelling — but storytelling reimagined. Breaking from prescriptive ideas of narrative, Flowers constructs vibrant visual languages and symbol systems that embody outrageous queerness and femininity. Her art offers a subversive take on spiritual and cultural iconography, centering Brown and Black femme experiences within a kaleidoscopic universe of color, craft, and fantasy. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican-American artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the David Rockefeller Center for Creative Arts, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee.
Her upcoming show at Hecho a Mano will feature new works on paper with sculptural elements, exploring a theme of surrendering to something bigger than yourself. “There’s a saying in 12-step circles that really resonates with me: ‘The war is over. You lost,’” says Flowers. “So in this way, there is freedom in defeat, it's the only place where we have interior agency to make a different choice, to go another way.”
This body of work references fantasy worldbuilding maps “that use cartoon languages to explore interior experiences of being lost, like a labyrinth, which is a navigational tool that is meant to work from the inside out.” It also references Where’s Waldo books, which Flowers calls “an incredible and brilliant learning tool that exercises our ability to see beyond what we take in at first glance—to spend the time to find out what we don’t already know, and affirming the adventure in that.”
Flowers explains that her art as a whole creates an environment of psychic revolt, allowing us to take pleasure in spaces we’ve been taught to feel ashamed: outrageous femininity, queer histories, and the complexities of our existence. “In the written account of the world, we’ve hardly existed—and yet here we are,” Flowers writes.
“The original definition of Utopia is no place.
We are Utopic by design.”
Both the images she creates and the media she works with are guided by the same intention: creating fantasies of survival for those not meant to survive. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. The materials she works with celebrate craft and media that are often dismissed as disposable, vain, “surface,” and “too much” because of their connection with femininity, including sequins, iridescent paints, clay, and beauty supplies with which she constructs lush and provocative cosmologies. These creations challenge colonial frameworks of value and taste, elevating craft and fantasy as vehicles for resistance and psychic survival. To Flowers, fantasy is not a means of escape, but a means of persistence: an act of rebellion against existential danger, and a tool for engaging with trauma.
Inspired by spiritual art traditions, Flowers’ work also draws from visual communication systems including comics, cartoons, codices, Egyptian scrolls, sympathetic magic, Caribbean Surrealisms and alchemical diagrams for transformation. Her art challenges encoded value systems that define what is important, intelligent and valuable, and what is unimportant, monstrous and trashy. Her practice reimagines what “divine power” can mean, rendering it as ungodly, hyper-feminized, and unapologetically queer. Her evocative work is a testament to the power of art to uplift, heal, and spark radical imagination. Pursuing Defeat will open at Hecho a Mano on Friday, February 7 and will be on view until March 3.