These self-portraits were created in the artist's home in New York City during the Covid-19 quarantine, from March To June 2020. In this body of work, Grullón simultaneously documents her time at home and current affairs affecting the nation during quarantine. As performances, they are sites of mapping, engaging in participatory approaches of record keeping with the body.
As she notes in her short piece for Verso Book’s blog Hot City, “In my work I want to encourage viewers to reflect upon my performances as particular processes where I express the undoing of colonial history through my body and actions. In a broader sense, I use photography to unravel the complexities of my signification in a straightforward manner relying only on the camera and performance as apparatus.”
Grullón, a native of New York City who still resides there, is a multidisciplinary artist who uses video, photography, social sculpture and performance to bring attention to issues like immigration, climate change, and racial and economic disparities. She argues for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. She is especially interested in community-centered agriculture and how art can help to re-establish dispossessed people's relationship to land as a means of undoing settler-colonial structures. Her ongoing embodied research focuses on activating public spaces to prioritize healing and archiving oral history in order to disrupt historical patterns that undermine the health and civic participation of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) peoples.
Alicia Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University, Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa 11, Old Stone House and Art in Odd Places. Her art activist work led her to be one of the initial and current organizers for The People’s Cultural Plan (The PCP), a collection of artists and cultural workers addressing inadequacies with the city’s first proposed cultural plan. Grullón has served as a mentor for New York Foundation of the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program and as Artist Catalyst for The Laundromat Project from 2016–2018. She is an adjunct at The School of Visual Arts and the City University of New York. She is also currently artist-in-residence at the Hemispheric Institute.
