Josely Carvalho is a Brazilian artist who based in New York City and Rio de Janeiro. She works in a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, printmaking, book art, video, and installation. She currently works with glass art and with smells to evoke memories and emotions in her project Diary of Smells.
Founder and director of The Silkscreen Project, which operated at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery from 1976 to 1987. to allow community members to learn silkscreen printing so that they’d be able to make posters and banners to use for protest and activism.
Recognition with community involvement and progress with the Silkscreen Project lead to Carvalho being invited to U.N. Mid-Decade Conference for Women, which covered issues relating to social, political, and economic discrimination toward female artists. Other women and conference attendees were taught how to silkscreen press as well.
Invited by the Comunidades Eclesiasticas de Base and the Workers Party back in Brazil to teach the how to create silkscreen banners that were going to be used for protest and activism. The party’s leaders then passed down this information to community members that they worked with.
Carvalho created the Latin American Women Artists to bring attention to other Latina artists in the United States. This project was initiated in 1983 and ended in 1987.
Series contained work from various Latina artists from various backgrounds and experiences to share their work, from poetry to films.
Book of Roofs (''Livro de Telhas'') (1997)
Interactive Installment - videos/photographs This project was initiated when Carvalho saw a stack of clay tiles and the worker’s process of creating these tiles from the initial shaping stage to the final stage of having to place of the tiles. This process, and labor in specific, was art to Carvalho. The major theme in this installment, which include approximately 3,000 tiles, is the idea of shelter and how there is a loss of shelter with the involvement of wars and natural disasters. The loss and destruction of one’s shelter then leads to a domino effect that leads to deterioration and damage to one’s physical, psychological, and emotional loss of an individual. Carvalho implemented an interactive component which is available in two ways - the interactive website that’s available online and allowing viewers become a tile-maker for this installment. In 2000, this online installment earned Carvalho Creative Capital Foundation individual artist grant. Access to installment can be found at http://bookofroofs.com/index.cfm
Ciranda I (1993)
Installation - Videos/photographs Bring attention to the abuse and violence of children in Brazil as many children had to rely on each other, sell their bodies into prostitution, become drug distributors, and steal whatever was accessible to them for survival. Many of these children were often killed by gunshot wound or decapitation by government officials or citizen vigilante groups to eradicate them from this region. The video installation for this piece featured images of Brazilian children, both dead and alive, and lists all the names and ages of the children that were found dead in Rio de Janeiro in the year 1991.
Rape and Intervention (1984)
Silkscreen This piece was created for the Artists Call Against the U.S. Intervention in Central America, which was a nationwide call to protest initiated by artists themselves in 1984. Using her notorious silkscreen printing that Carvalho is known for, it features a young girl at the top of the wearing only underwear with soldiers underneath her in military clothes and guns. This collaborative piece was one out of six panel installments discussing themes of rape and intervention that also featured the works of other artists including Catalina Parra, Paulette Nenner and Nancy Spero.
Creative Capital Foundation Grant, 2000-2005 New York State Council for the Arts, 2001-2002 Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center Residency, 2001 Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio International Conference and Residency in Italy, 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts, 1999-2000
