At Swivel Gallery, Amy Bravo Confronts Intergenerational Trauma, Identity and the Power of the Collective
For a long time, Amy Bravo’s art practice has been a restless attempt to carve out her own identity as a queer woman artist and to reconcile her stratified, partially denied and erased family lineage, which connects her to both Cuba and the south of Italy. She has embarked, through her art, on a cathartic journey to confront the dismissed and suppressed weight of intergenerational trauma, probing its essence through a largely subconscious and intuitive appropriation and resemanticization of fragmented familial narratives. Through this ongoing and often painful exercise in storytelling, where the personal intersects with the collective, her work has evolved and expanded, giving rise to a dense mythological realm that allows her to redefine the contours of her emotional and psychological experience rather than retreat from it.
Her second solo exhibition with Swivel Gallery, “Like A Horde Of Living Beings, We Gradually Covered The Earth,” is a decisive new chapter in Bravo’s artistic and personal evolution. Earlier in her practice, the central focus of her research was an investigation into the meaning of “being a Bravo,” the familial inheritance connecting both sides of her lineage—one she has only recently begun to reclaim and reconcile, moving between grief and recognition.
Many of her works stage an openly tense confrontation with the masculine, often depicting Amazonian feminine figures engaged in struggle with symbolic animals such as roosters or bulls—metaphorical embodiments of patriarchal force. These figures, frequently conceived as surrogates for the artist or those closest to her, ultimately assert control over the scene, overturning traditional hierarchies and affirming, with unmistakable clarity, their female and queer presence.
In her latest body of work, however, Bravo’s feminine armies gather, drawing strength from one another and moving with a shared awareness of collective and feminine solidarity, while also embracing the fragility of their transient, earthbound and fleshbound existence. Moving beyond strictly personal and biographical trauma, Bravo now confronts the collective, situating individual experience within a broader psychic and historical continuum.
Drawing on a poem by Clarice Lispector, the exhibition’s title evokes the regenerative power of belonging within the collective. “Like a horde of living beings, we gradually covered the earth,” it reads. “Busy like people who plow for their existence, and plant, and harvest, and kill, and live, and die, and eat,” invoking the cyclical nature of existence and the necessity of embracing this flux that binds individuals to a larger whole. It suggests that survival itself depends on mutual recognition, interdependence and a shared sense of presence.
“I remember seeing this fly zooming down the street in winter, and I thought, what is this fly doing alive right now? I became obsessed with it—the idea of this small thing surviving in a world it wasn’t made for,” Bravo tells Observer. As a small person moving through the city, she often feels that same dissonance. “I think collectively and politically, many of us feel that way right now, like the smallest we could possibly feel.” These new works emerge from a grounded understanding that trauma cannot be isolated or contained within the individual. Each person exists as part of a larger energetic and historical continuum, shaped by ancestral inheritance and collective experience. “This show is about feeling small in a big world that wasn’t made for you, and about how much we need each other—how every person who feels small needs to come together and feel bigger as a unit.”
At the center of the exhibition stands a sculpture of a woman-fly, directly inspired by that fleeting encounter. Bravo even composed a kind of eulogy for her: “I wanted that fly to live at least until February, and I wanted her to die belly up, looking at the stars. I think that’s what she deserves.” The work functions as both homage and portal: welded metal wings extend from a plaster body crowned with a Halloween wig, while above it Bravo suspended an entire galaxy, an imagined cosmos hovering precariously like a porous membrane or filter between dimensions. It suggests an infinite alternative space, one through which she can project herself beyond the constraints and vulnerabilities of the present moment. The sculpture serves as both conceptual anchor and generative origin for the exhibition’s broader mythological and emotional terrain.
Since her earliest work, Bravo has developed a precise and ever-expanding symbolic lexicon, one that emerges intuitively through her process of visual and mythological storytelling. Stylized palm trees, roosters, horses, slicked-back mustaches, machetes and references drawn from Latino popular culture and ancestral spiritual traditions surface organically from a shared subconscious field. These symbols intermingle freely with fragments of family memory, allowing Bravo to construct an intimate and fantastical cosmology—one that exists both outside linear time and in dialogue with it.
Her figures retain a ghostly and evanescent quality, rendered in soft pastel tones of sand, pink and beige, as if suspended between presence and disappearance. They seem to emerge from a temporal dimension that resists fixed representation, hovering instead at the threshold between memory and invention. Bravo often describes them as pale apparitions surfacing from the dense morning fog of the Cuban countryside, carriers of stories that refuse to remain buried.
At times recalling Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas or the enigmatic figures of Belkis Ayón, these sketched silhouettes dissolve into their surrounding atmosphere, absorbing and reflecting it while assuming a distinctly spiritual presence. Their porous forms evoke ancient Caribbean cosmologies, resisting the erasure of a place known primarily through inherited stories rather than lived experience. The muted pastel palette also recalls the faded frescoes of Italy, though Bravo notes that its origins are more personal, tracing back to the church where her grandfather’s funeral was held—a space where she first felt a sensory and emotional convergence between Cuba and her own lived environment.
As Bravo explains, many of the visual and emotional foundations of her work emerged from memories of a Roman Catholic church in Northern New Jersey, where her grandparents’ funerals took place. In that setting, she encountered a powerful synthesis of her cultural inheritance: the architectural and communal structure of her Italian upbringing punctuated by the sudden emotional presence of her Cuban lineage. The church became, in her mind, a site of suspension—a purgatorial threshold between life and death, belonging and absence, past and present.
These aesthetic strategies also resonate with critic Charles Merewether’s observation that Latino artists often loosen images from their fixed symbolic function once separated from their geographic origins. This dynamic is evident in Bravo’s recurring depictions of palm trees, which appear as simplified and abstracted archetypes rather than literal representations, functioning as markers within what might be described as a “placeless place”—a psychological terrain shaped by memory, displacement and imagination.
In these new works, however, Bravo’s protagonists become more individuated and emotionally legible. As they turn inward, confronting their own psychological landscapes, the figures begin to assert autonomy and presence. They are no longer defined solely through opposition or resistance but through a deeper process of self-recognition and internal negotiation, emerging as fully realized psychic entities.
In (As Termite Mound) (2025), a red chalk figure rises from the earth, its clay body shaped by the same primordial forces that govern geological transformation and material flux. The figure appears less constructed than unearthed, as if summoned from a deeper temporal register.
Where Bravo’s earlier work centered on direct confrontation with masculine archetypes, these symbolic oppositions now dissolve. Rather than standing apart, the antagonistic forces begin to merge with her figures, suggesting a movement toward integration and reconciliation. Embracing hybrid transformation, her protagonists undergo a process of metamorphosis, absorbing and becoming what once stood in opposition. “For a long time, my work has been about fighting the masculine archetype,” she acknowledges. “Then my figure began merging with those symbols—she became the rooster, she became the bull. Now I’m interested in who she is apart from them. That’s also a part of her.”
If Bravo’s work has long functioned as a space to stage continuous internal and external conflict, these new works are instead animated by a deliberate effort toward healing, reconciliation and regeneration. “When you notice a trait in yourself, particularly as a woman, that mirrors a toxic trait, the question becomes: will you repurpose it for something good, or will you eradicate it and move on?” Bravo reflects. “If you notice that you’ve done something that reminds you of how they act, then you have to kill that part of yourself.” Yet she has also come to understand that such traits must first be fully confronted and recognized before they can be transformed. When assimilated and integrated, they contribute to a deeper emotional and relational awareness, revealing the complexity of identity rather than its fracture.
Bravo’s figures often appear as multiples, existing simultaneously across different psychic and emotional states, splitting into divergent possibilities of the self. Suspended within a liminal and generative condition, they undergo continuous metamorphosis and evolution. Animated by expressive impulse, the figure expands, multiplies or dissolves, while the pictorial field itself seems unable to contain the narrative forces at play, which spill outward beyond the limits of the canvas. (Under The Skin and Humming – A Synchronized Universe) from 2025 captures these emerging inner pulsions with particular clarity, channeling them into tangible form. Bravo recalls the moment a friend was about to discard the bugle that now hangs from the work. “I immediately told them, ‘Don’t throw that out—give it to me.’ The moment I saw it, I knew it had to become an esophagus,” she says. Here, it becomes a conduit for interior force, symbolizing how power can emerge through collective presence within the body. In the work, the figure breathes outward, releasing this accumulated internal energy into the surrounding space.
Bravo once described her figures as avatars, extensions of herself akin to characters in a video game. Over time, however, they have evolved alongside her, gaining autonomy and strength. “They are stronger, more capable. They reflect how I move through the world, but also who I might become.”
Central to these works is a sustained exploration of scale, shifting fluidly between the microscopic and the monumental while tracing the correspondences between them. In one piece, an entire ant colony moves across the surface, embodying the latent power of collective action, regardless of individual size or strength. “I became interested in hive minds and collectives: many individuals sharing one thought or goal,” Bravo explains, recalling how these reflections led her back to childhood memories as a gymnast, surrounded by other strong girls. “That was the one time I felt fully supported by a collective.”
Notably, Bravo initially intended to pursue editorial illustration. However, working digitally left her unsatisfied, lacking the physical immediacy she instinctively sought. Raised by a mother deeply attuned to craft, Bravo grew up making things with her hands, developing an early sensitivity to material and process. A decisive turning point came in 2018, when encountering Kerry James Marshall’s retrospective gave her the confidence to engage more directly and ambitiously with painting. “His paintings felt immediate, like pure thought translated directly onto canvas. After that, I began working on large canvases without planning or sketching. I let the work unfold intuitively,” Bravo recalls.
Throughout her practice, Bravo’s work retains an unmistakable DIY ethos, shaped by what might be understood as rasquachismo—a resourcefulness born from constraint and necessity, the ability to create expansively from limited means. This sensibility resonates across Italian postwar art, Cuban visual culture and broader diasporic traditions in the U.S., where material scarcity often gave rise to radical formal invention. Drawing on a dense symbolic lexicon, Bravo’s works expand both narratively and physically beyond conventional pictorial boundaries, frequently extending outward through sculptural frames and material additions that activate the surrounding wall as part of the composition.
Objects enter her work organically, accumulating in the studio until their presence finds its place within the evolving structure of the painting. Each found object carries its own embedded history, expanding the metaphorical and narrative field. “Objects can communicate something instantly, often with humor. In a way, I create giant curio cabinets—spaces where objects and stories coexist,” she reflects. “It’s important to me that the paintings operate as more than windows. I need them to function like doors opening, places where things can climb out of,” she emphasizes. In this way, the work becomes a threshold space—purgatorial, animated and unsettled—hovering at the edge of visibility, poised between containment and emergence.
Embroidery occupies an equally central role in Bravo’s practice, functioning both as a material technique and as a symbolic gesture. Her grandmothers, on both her Cuban and Italian sides, worked in textile factories, and the act of sewing is a means of honoring that lineage. “My own sewing is not the best, but it’s an homage to them. It reflects my attempt to connect to that lineage, even if imperfectly,” Bravo reflects, noting how the gesture sustains a matriarchal continuity rooted in the intersection of female labor, care and survival.
One of the works in the exhibition introduces a newly recurring figure in Bravo’s symbolic vocabulary: the angel. Here, the angel represents a male figure who abuses his authority. In the composition, the angel is hunted and attacked by small creatures, embodying the collective force of the marginalized rising against structures of imposed dominance. The work reflects Bravo’s ongoing interest in collective resistance and transformation, where seemingly minor forces acquire strength through unity.
Ultimately, Bravo’s work has evolved beyond a purely autobiographical framework, becoming instead a site of communion with ancestral memory, confrontation and self-definition. “I’m alive, and so I seek to make the painting seem like it’s trying to become real, while also highlighting the impossibility of the site’s reality.” Her paintings operate as living systems, suspended between material presence and metaphysical projection.
Bravo’s practice speaks to stories carried across generations and geographies, confronting questions of identity, inheritance and belonging shaped by intergenerational and ancestral trauma. Through a symbolic language that transcends linear time, her work accesses both personal and collective memory, transforming inherited pain into a generative and regenerative force. From this expanded vantage point, she engages with the entangled dynamics of gender, history and healing, affirming the enduring possibility of transformation through shared awareness.