Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco

"I like it when people come up to me and tell me that that my work has brought them joy, or that it’s given them goosebumps. It means I must be doing something right, but then again, it is beyond my control. I can only hope that they will take something away from it."

I imagine that centuries ago, “outsider” would include any women, Black people, Indigenous people—in other words, anyone who wasn’t categorically known as Man from the dawn of Gender and Race—who had the guts to defy social expectations and put their creativity out there. I’d like to think that the greatest artists across all media are people who are, in the deepest sense of the word, novices or art babes who either lacked access to “formal training” or weren’t considered person enough (which, like, gross) to be included in The Conversation, and decided they didn’t need that to express their innermost brilliance. 

So, I gift these musings as creative fodder, and I present this exhibition, which was absolutely magical for someone who’s on an eternal quest to interrogate everything until its bones sing, as a moment of reflection on whether Art is a gatekeep-y, awkward stringing together or Western norms and attitudes that demands one to give in, or if it’s just something We do, love, and care for.