Laís Amaral

The Artsy Vanguard 2025 artists are breaking new ground with original work and gaining momentum through acclaimed solo shows, prestigious institutional exhibitions, representation with tastemaking galleries, and bold art fair presentations, among other art world accolades. Like past Vanguard artists, they’re ones to watch. Laís is included as is Emily.

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Awilda Sterling-Duprey

For Burnaway’s series CRUSH, Michelle Santiago Cortés details the dance-drawings and improvisational mark-making of Awilda Sterling-Duprey. Throughout her decades-long career, Sterling-Duprey has paid close attention to how movement appears in painting and how dance lends itself to its own kind of painterly gesture. She has distilled elements of both disciplines to their constituent parts, which can be broken down into kinds of information: visual, spatial, tactile, sonic, and so on.

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Jesús Rafael Soto

Jesús was a pioneer of the idea that a viewer could actually walk into an artwork and experience it from the inside, something we now take for granted, but which was revolutionary in its time. Born in Venezuela, it was in Paris in the 1950s that he immersed himself in the movements that were transforming Geometric Abstraction by using effects of motion and movement to bring artworks to life: literally, as in Kinetic Art, or metaphorically, as in Op Art, in which paintings or sculptures appear to be moving due to visual trickery. His works were realized on increasingly grand scales, so that eventually viewers could move within and throughout his vast sculptural forms. This made his work perfect for realization as grand public art, and so his legacy is visible across many cityscapes today.

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Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez

Maria (who shows with David Castillo) has developed an index of color relations to determine specific emotions, memories and spirituality. The colors can be autonomous or have a new meaning altogether when encountering other colors and the forms they inhabit. The artist’s work is about the history of her body (a Cuban born body) in a permanent state of displacement and exile. Her paintings try to express the state in which this happens. They are about the inability to belong in any defined structure.

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Patrizia Ferreira

is currently showing Precarious Habitats at Meredith University’s Weems Gallery. Ferreira’s work incorporates thread, yarn, found, and heirloom fabrics, as well as a variety of repurposed materials, such as plastics, to create sculptural embroidered paintings.

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Rigoberto Mena

Rigoberto is known as one of Cuba’s most famous art visionaries. His style has been described as an intellectual process in which he explores space and depth while grounding his vision in architectural elements. He has recently moved to the Triangle so heads up folks.

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Aníbal Villacis

Art of the Americas: Collection of the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States notes that Ecuadoran artist Aníbal Villacís is a bridge between two worlds: ancient and modern.

Saw below when I was at the Ackland seeing work by Jack and Frank. Her work reminds me of Charles also.

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