BIO & Artist Statement
BIO
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.
Photo by Stanley Larry.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an artist, proudly rooted by place, Detroit, and courageously unrestricted by form. I paint. I photograph. I transform objects and manipulate materials. I create collages. Each work is part of an ever-evolving conversation with my city, identity, memory, the world around me, and the relationships I see between issues seemingly in opposition but often connected.
I choose the word artist over being labeled one thing —such as merely a painter — because I’m enlivened by looking at issues from multiple angles and using various mediums, textures, and materials. Much like the shape at the center of many of my paintings and canvas selections, I am constantly circling back, exploring, questioning, and sometimes simply honoring themes central to who I am as a person. I’m curious about motherhood, from conception to birth, about the toll of racism, about the effects of time on people, on the land, on history. Making art in Detroit for nearly three decades has only deepened this commitment to allowing the process to lead my work to its preferred form.
Whether representational or abstract – preferably in series, the hope for my work is the same, to capture a connectedness to people, issues, and histories I am compelled to account for, value, and memorialize. I imagine the untold stories and the many things we don’t know. My eye is always shifting. A current series, What Comes From Dirt, is inspired by a photograph of a dirt mound from a lot I own in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood. The dirt symbolizes the resilience of people and places and the unexpected literal and figurative surprises of exploring unknowns or fixed ideas. The dirt, a source of life and transformation, is a metaphor for my journey and the determination of community in the face of struggle.
Through art, I remain inspired. I’m convinced it is my truest lens to understand the past, reflect on the present, and imagine our future.