Catherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Lenape territory (NYC) to parents from Kiskeya Ayiti (Dominican Republic). Intersectional feminist theory, archival research, and earth-based healing inform their practice. They work to reclaim ancestral technologies that have been systematically erased by drawing from multiple disciplines to unearth histories and make space for decolonial futures. Employing techniques of framing, opacity, desire, and language, they work in a variety of mediums including installation, bookmaking, video, text, and fabric. 

Visit Botánica Cimarrón to find their plant spirit medicines, classes and more. They are also the co-founder of Abuela Taught Me, an Afro-Taino Two-Spirit educational space, and a founding member of Homecoming, a QTBIPOC radical care collective. Catherine is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles department of Interdisciplinary Studio.

Catherine Feliz

Mensaje Para Escribiente / Message for a Scribe, 2016

Single channel video (color, sound)

4:17mins

Can a pious life transcend the colonial control over black women's bodies? Who has access to freely travel and record their lived experiences? Using excerpts from Teresa Chikaba’s hagiography Compendio de la Vida Ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo (1752), and George Bernard Shaw’s The Black Girl in Search of God (1932), consecutively, Feliz points to markers of agency. 

With literacy strictly prohibited for slaves of the Spanish empire, it is unlikely that Chikaba wrote her own journal which is cited as a main source for her hagiography; and Shaw, an Irish man, writes a travel adventure novel from the perspective of an African woman. These two stories meet at a crossroads with webcam portraits and self made nature-esque documentaries made in the confines of the artist’s home.