The Collection

Raelis Vásquez creates large-scale figurative paintings that weave together history, politics, and personal memory to illuminate the Afro-Latinx experience. Working primarily in oil, he draws from personal photographs, family archives, and observations of daily life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. His meticulous brushwork and warm, atmospheric palettes imbue his subjects with both intimacy and gravitas, presenting them as complex figures who embody intersecting identities of Blackness, migration, and cultural hybridity.

Having immigrated to the United States in 2002, Vásquez views painting as both an act of resistance and of care, a means of honoring overlooked communities while challenging the conventions of Western portraiture. His works oscillate between traditional portraiture and contemporary genre scenes, situating everyday gestures within broader narratives of displacement, resilience, and belonging. Sands from the beaches of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey often find their way into his canvases, collapsing geographies and symbolizing the duality of his own identity.

Vásquez has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, New York; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn; the Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte; and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids. He was the youngest artist to participate in El Museo del Barrio’s inaugural triennial in 2021. His work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Newark Museum of Art, among others. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University.