Danielle De Jesus is a Nuyorican painter and photographer born and raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn, whose works tell the story of growing up in New York City amidst gentrification and displacement. She draws from her experience growing up in the diaspora as a native of Bushwick, New York to document her home neighborhood while creating narratives that uplift the lives and stories of the multi diverse residents she grew up with. De Jesus’ background is in photography and she utilizes her images of the people native to Bushwick as a reference to tell the story of Bushwick’s displaced residents, informed by her personal experiences with gentrification and displacement. Danielle De Jesus’ images makes us rethink the significance of the image and the politics of representation involving the largely low-income people of color depicted in her paintings. Her work pushes us to think critically about the larger economies of urban America, but also about matters of intimacy and the interior lives of local residents. Ultimately, her works make viewers think about the effects of capitalism, and the urban settler colonial histories impacting Puerto Rican diaspora communities in Brooklyn, Puerto Rico and beyond. Danielle works in painting, photography and uses multimedia objects such as dollar bills and common household items such as tablecloths to create texture stories of everyday life and resilience.
Danielle received a BFA from F.I.T in 2019 and an MFA from Yale School of Art 2021. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS.1, the Akron Museum in Akron Ohio, and most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art. De Jesus’s work is part of the permanent collection at the Perez Art Museum of Miami and most recently the Whitney Museum of American Art.
