Network Node
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Name:
Adriene Cruz
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City/Place:
Portland, Oregon
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Harlem, New York
CURATION
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from this node by:
Matrix+
Current News
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What's Up?
"Studio, sanctuary, temple... a magical refuge for channeling creativity"
My main studio is in the attic of an old house ....I have everything and its mother up there. Sometimes the studio is the back yard where I can create in natural light and nature. Other times the studio is where I'm artist in residence which is always a magical experience.
Life & Work
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Bio:
"The art I create fulfills a powerful desire to express visually what's not easily spoken, a passion for color, a love of symbols, and a deep interest in matters of the Spirit. Gifts of my ancestors, angels, and spirit guides celebrating the power of art beyond visual image flows through me as a celebration of survival. Ancestral roots real and imagined offer a base to channel elements of healing and blessings."
Harlem native Adriene Cruz was deeply inspired by her mothers creative use of color and the rich cultural influences of her childhood community.
Adriene attended the High School of Art and Design and received a BFA from the School of Visual Art in NewYork.
After relocating to Portland, Oregon she explored quilting at the Oregon School of Art and Craft. What emerged were brilliantly colored and adorned quilts, large and small, piecing together richly patterned materials in rhythmic arrangements, structured as well as improvisational, deeply moving on a spiritual level and simply enjoyable for their sheer beauty.
Fabric, cowrie shells, mirrors, sequins, beads , tribal silver, even beetle wings and fragrant herbs are among the endless adornments and amulets in Adriene's artistic alchemy.
Adriene's creative vision garnered invitations to create public art in her Portland community. Often engaging community youth, Adriene created street banners, murals, decorative trash bins and a billboard. Public artist Valerie Otani invited Adriene to design one of Portland's Light Rail stations. The artists collaborated creating colorful glass mosaic, handmade tiles, steel railings and concrete benches reflecting Ashanti culture. "Stone quilts" embedded in the paving also adorn the platform of Killingsworth Station..
Adriene has exhibted internationally in Brazil, Costa Rica and South Africa. Nationally her work has exhibited at the Smithsonian in D.C., The Folk Art Museum, NY, American Craft Museum , NY, Museum of Biblical Art, NY, The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA. to name a few. Collections include the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, Hartsfield International Airport, Atlanta GA, Haborview Medical Center, Seattle, Portland Community College and numerous private collections.
What's Been Happening?
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I. IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS BRAZIL: "The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..." (Assis Valente)
Quincy Jones>Alfredo Rodriguez>Munir Hossn>Roberto Mendes>Alumínio & João Saturno
II. AND THE MISSION (THE OPEN WORLD)
III. AND THE ECONOMIST
Matrix team-member Darius Mans, Economist (PhD, MIT), president of Africare (largest aid organization in Africa), presents Africare award to Lula (2012). From 2000 to 2004 Darius served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola, leading a team which generated $150 million in annual lending, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment. Darius lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador, Bahia.
IV. LET THERE BE PATHWAYS!
"I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
— Susan Rogers, Personal recording engineer for Prince at Paisley Park Recording Studio; Director, Music Perception & Cognition Laboratory, Berklee College of Music
"Many thanks for this - I am touched!" — Julian Lloyd Webber
"I'm truly thankful... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)" — Nduduzo Makhathini, Blue Note Records
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!" — Alicia Svigals, Klezmer violin, Founder of The Klezmatics
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))" — Clarice Assad
"Thank you" — Banch Abegaze, manager, Kamasi Washington
The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made evolved...
...all essentially cut off from the world at large. But after 40,000 years of artistic creation by mankind, it's finally now possible to create bridges closely interconnecting all artists everywhere (having begun with the Saturno brothers above).
Curate anybody in here. You appear on their page. Anybody in here curates you, they appear on your page...
...plugged into a superpower: the small world phenomenon.
By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.
And by extension, to within discoverable reach of everybody everywhere on the planet.
Small world curation is the Matrix's unprecedented innovation.
Because 40,000 years is a long time to wait.
And if all art is discoverable from everywhere, then Brazil's is too.
"The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..."
(Music by Assis Valente. Clip by Betão Aguiar. The Matrix was built in Salvador's Centro Histórico above, incorporating these marvelous people.)
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.
Nowhere else but here. Brazil itself is a matrix.
