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 place and unrestricted by form. Working across painting, photography, objects, installation, and mixed media, I explore how places hold memory, history, identity, and time. My practice is grounded in Detroit, the city where I have lived and worked for more than two decades, while also carrying the cultural memory of Suriname, where I was born and from which I was separated as a child. These places are not simply subjects of my work; they are part of how I understand myself and the world.

I am interested in place as something living and continually changing. I return to specific sites over years, observing how landscapes, neighborhoods, structures, and relationships transform, and how my own perception transforms with them. Photography, painting, and other forms of making become ways of slowing down, looking again, and making visible what might otherwise be overlooked. I am especially drawn to the layers of a place: what has been there before, what is present now, what is disappearing, and what might come next.

Layering is also fundamental to how I make. I move between abstraction and representation, photography and painting, found and constructed forms, allowing the materials and process to determine the direction of the work. I resist a singular way of seeing because places and experiences are never singular. A landscape can hold beauty and loss; a neighborhood can carry memory, transformation, abandonment, and possibility simultaneously. I want the work to retain that complexity rather than resolve it.

Nature is an ongoing teacher. I am attentive to changing light, seasons, color, growth, decay, and impermanence. These observations inform both my imagery and my understanding of time. I am increasingly interested in the materials themselves, where they come from, how they are transformed, and how making might become more connected to the environments and communities in which it takes place.

Ultimately, my practice is an act of attention. I make to understand, to remember, and to look again. I hope the work invites others to pause before what seems familiar and recognize the layers that are already there: the histories beneath a landscape, the memories held by a place, and the possibilities that emerge when we learn to see differently.