BIO & Artist Statement

Yvette Rock was born in Paramaribo, Suriname in 1975. Her family fled from Suriname in 1983 and became political asylees in the United States, landing in Miami Beach, Florida. At the age of 17, she moved to New York City where she attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997. She then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Michigan in 1999. During her time at U of M, she conceived of a course called Detroit Connections, an on-going program that connects U of M students, staff and faculty with Detroit schools. Rock began working as an artist-in-residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit in 1999, teaching art to children in grades K-12. In 2001, she moved to Detroit, where she has dedicated the past two decades of her life to bringing art to Detroiters of all ages and stages of life. She is the founder and CEO of Live Coal Gallery, LLC and the founder and Executive Director of Live Coal, a non-profit organization.  Live Coal Gallery is a 2017, 2019, and 2021 Knight Arts Challenge Detroit Winner. Rock is also a 2019 Facing Change: Documenting Detroit Fellow.

 I am a visual artist currently focusing on creating mixed media works on paper, canvas, wood, and found objects.  I am not locked-into one type of style; instead, I fosters a dialogue between the concept and process.  I desire to make moving pieces layered with meaning; art that is ambitious, technical, and experimental; art that is bold, detailed, and unpredictable. I explore topics such as Human Conception from a biological, aesthetic, and spiritual perspective; Motherhood, often reflecting on my own journey as a mother of five children; Identity and Racism, wrestling with personal and societal ideas about self, blackness, and multiculturalism; and the Collision of Worlds, exploring the relationship between life and death, light and shadows, materialism and the ephemeral. I often employ the power of the figurative form – whether representational or abstract – to reclaim a vision of people whose bodies or histories are neither accounted for, nor treated with care and attention. I am also inspired by the power and beauty of nature to convey these ideas through colors, textures, and contrast. The use of symbols and images such as circles, dolls, birds, leaves, flowers, the colors red, black, and gold, are often a part of my visual language.