Charo Oquet: Fragments, Trances, and Improvised Architectures

Charo Oquet uses painting, installation, performance, photography, and film to explore themes of displacement, identity, and cultural hybridity. Her works blur the boundaries between ritual, memory, and contemporary visual culture, creating immersive experiences that reflect on migration, gender, and decolonial aesthetics.
In her recent series, Fragments, Trances, and Improvised Architectures, Oquet returns to painting as a means of investigating the cyclical nature of creation. Fragmented canvases, layered collage, and gestural sculptural forms come together in a process of erasure and reconstruction, mirroring transformation as an essential part of existence. Her abstract wooden sculptures extend this exploration, acting as vessels of energy—imbued with spiritual and elemental forces, resonating like sacred objects.
Describing this body of work, Oquet explains, “Much like life itself, these pieces serve as a reflection on our past, offering an opportunity for learning and growth as we shed the unnecessary to embrace a more fulfilling existence.” Through this process, her work becomes a meditation on renewal, movement, and the constant evolution of form and meaning.

About the Artist
Charo Oquet’s multidisciplinary practice explores cultural displacement, identity, and decolonial aesthetics. Born in the Dominican Republic, she now lives and works in Miami. She has received the 2024 Latinx Artist Fellowship, the Bass Museum-New Sculpture Award (2022), the Ellies Creator Award (2020), and grants from Knight Challenge and the Perez Family Foundation.
Her work has been exhibited at the Bass Museum, Dimensions Variable, Lummus Park, and internationally in Relational Undercurrents at the Museum of Latin American Art. Her work is held in major collections, including the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Frost Art Museum at FIU, CAAM in Spain, the Bass Museum of Art, and institutions in New Zealand and the Dominican Republic.