BIO & Artist Statement
BIO
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.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an artist rooted in Detroit and unrestricted by form. I paint, photograph, draw, collage, and assemble—working across materials to explore place, memory, identity, and the passage of time. Each work is part of an ongoing conversation with my city and with the relationships I see between things that may appear opposed, yet are often deeply connected.
I choose the word artist intentionally, rather than defining myself by a single medium. Curiosity drives my practice and allows me to approach ideas from multiple angles, letting process guide each work to its preferred form. Much like the recurring circular shapes found in many of my paintings and supports, I return again and again to themes central to who I am: place, motherhood, the toll of racism, and the ways time shapes people, land, and history. After nearly three decades of making art in Detroit, I have learned to trust this return—to exploration, questioning, and sometimes simple honoring—as an essential part of my practice.
Nature is a constant teacher in my work. I am fascinated by its movement, impermanence, and capacity for transformation, from what happens at a molecular level to what we perceive with our eyes. I am less interested in capturing a fixed moment than in honoring a glimmer of change—the shifting of clouds, the movement of light and shadow, the way color transforms throughout the day. In recent landscape paintings, I explore these ideas through the lens of color theory, using complementary and unexpected hues to challenge perception and reflect on how what we see in the present is not always how things once were or will be in the future. Color becomes a way to think about time, history, and memory—how they shift, overlap, and reappear. I think about the bodies that once traveled and shaped the places I paint or photograph and how those very places might disappear due to social or political reasons.
Whether working abstractly or representationally, often in series, my intention remains the same: to create a sense of connectedness to people, places, issues, and histories I feel compelled to account for, value, and memorialize. I am drawn to untold stories and to the many things we do not fully know. A recent series, What Comes From Dirt, was inspired by a photograph of a dirt mound on a lot I own in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood. The dirt serves as both a literal and symbolic source of life, resilience, and transformation—a metaphor for personal journey and collective determination in the face of struggle.
Prayer is a grounding force in my practice, and dreams and visions often offer unexpected imagery and direction. Through art, I remain inspired. It is my truest lens for understanding the past, reflecting on the present, and imagining what comes next.