BIO & Artist Statement

b. Paramaribo, Suriname 1975

Yvette  Rock is a painter, object-maker, photographer, and performer. She graduated with a  Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1997  and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Michigan in 1999. She is currently pursuing a K-12 Certificate in Visual Arts Education from  College for  Creative Studies. Yvette has been a teaching artist with InsideOut  Literary Arts for 25 years and continues to partner with organizations  to bring  visual arts to children. In 2012 she founded Live Coal Gallery, LLC  (now Rock Gallery of Art, LLC) – a small business in Detroit. LCG was a recipient of the 2017,  2019, and 2021 Knight Arts Challenge. Rock is the Founder and Executive  Director of Live Coal, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization transforming  lives and neighborhoods through art, community development, and  education. She is a 2019 Facing Change: Documenting Detroit Fellow and a 2024 Seed and Bloom: Detroit Fellow. Rock lives in  Detroit with her husband and five children.

I am an artist rooted in Detroit and unrestricted by form. I paint, photograph, build, and assemble, working across materials to explore place, memory, identity, and the passage of time. My practice is an ongoing conversation with my city and with the relationships I see between ideas that may appear in opposition, yet are often deeply connected.

I choose the word artist intentionally. Curiosity guides my work, allowing me to approach questions from multiple angles and to let process determine form. After nearly three decades of making art in Detroit, I continue to return to themes that shape my lived experience—place, motherhood, the toll of racism, history, and time. I am interested in time as it exists in the natural world, in the human body, and in landscapes shaped by memory. 

Nature is a constant teacher in my work. Its movement, impermanence, and capacity for transformation influence how I move between abstraction and representation. I am less interested in capturing a single moment than in honoring a glimmer of change—the shifting of clouds, the movement of light, or the way color transforms throughout the day. In recent landscape paintings, I engage color theory as a way to question perception, using complementary and unexpected hues to suggest how what we see now is not always how things once were.

Prayer grounds my creative process, and dreams and visions often offer unexpected imagery and direction. Whether working abstractly or figuratively, often in series, my work seeks to honor people, places, and stories—especially those that remain unseen or untold. Art remains my truest lens for understanding the past, reflecting on the present, and imagining the future.