Madame Dolores is a global majority, multi-platform cross-disciplinary artist, who employs sound, vision, text, and performance as storytelling tools to create radical, sometimes controversial, artistic experiences and cultural engagements. She utilizes her art to confront and excavate the root of societal ills.
Imagine growing up in a house where every, single thing was a creative act, from how the linen closet was organized, to how the Christmas tree was decorated, to how music was made, the living room painted, to the drawings made at the kitchen table. That is how she grew up, surrounded by art, immersed in art. That is why she is a multi-disciplinary artist, who is a writer, a visual artist, a performing artist, and a musician. Why should she pick; when she sees no division between disciplines, nor between her desire for a just world. The art making is her and she is the art making. Being an artist is not a special extension of herself but an expression of her full self.
It has always been a part of who she is, and these creative acts are what she brings to her multi-disciplinary practice. Her range of creativity encompasses paintings, drawings, small objects, installations, poetry and art books, music, performance art, playwriting, and creative collaborations. Her various bodies of work draw inspiration from: vibrant light and color from nature, global myths and ancient symbolism, nightmares and dreams, ugly truths and beautiful lies, and spiritual practices of stillness and healing. It is a disarming and magical evocation to see and unsee the world in order to connect and be at one with the world.
The thread that connects all these disparate disciplines is a humanistic empathy that confronts our inability to coexist and reimagines new mythologies of inclusion and belonging. It is an exploration on how to evolve one’s humanity within discriminatory, oppressive systems, tackling this exploration from the vantage point of different disciplines and mediums.
Amidst the creativity in the home that she grew up in were vigorous talks around the dining room table about injustice and inequity. Growing up in the 1970's, as a child of a German immigrant Mother and an African American Father, living in America, she would find the cultural identity of her family under attack. Her art became a means of understanding the inescapable oppression and cruelty she was facing. With urgency, she deconstructs and decolonizes the reality she has inherited to create pathways to freedom. Viewers are invited to sit with the work and enter the various realms of the human story as she challenges them to authentically see themselves in order to dream forward a reality of belonging in shared equity and joy. Where coexistence is not a zero-sum game predicated on imaginary borders, inflated privilege and invented supremacy.
She was once asked if she is trying to change minds. She responded, stubborn minds will ignore facts and reality and refuse to budge-but hearts, hearts will respond to compassion, kindness and love and from that warm experience, a mind will change.