BIOGRAPHY
Yazmany Arboleda (b. 1981, Colombian-American) is an artist, educator, and community organizer whose work transforms cities into canvases of collective imagination. Based in Brooklyn, he is the inaugural People’s Artist for New York City and the founder of The People’s Creative Institute, a radical civic studio that uses art to ignite belonging and reimagine democracy.
Trained as an architect, Yazmany approaches public space as sacred ground for storytelling. For over two decades, he has conceived and led large-scale participatory art projects across five continents—including in South Africa, Afghanistan, India, Colombia, and the United States—often in response to crisis, disconnection, and systemic invisibility. His raw materials are people, place, and the courageous act of dreaming together.
In 2022, he served as lead producer for Little Amal Walks NYC, a city-wide procession that invited over 100,000 New Yorkers into shared ritual around migration, memory, and hope. He is the Senior Artistic Advisor to the Community Arts Network and has been commissioned by institutions such as Carnegie Hall, Yale University, the United Nations, and BRIC.
Yazmany believes art is a verb—a living force that invites us into deeper relationship with each other and the world we’re building. His work lives at the intersection of government, community, and poetry, and poses luminous, urgent questions: Where do we go to practice imagining? How do we do that together?
He teaches at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. His life—shaped by migration, grief, resistance, and radical joy—continues to inform a practice that is ever evolving.
BIOGRAFIA
Yazmany Arboleda (nacido en 1981, colombiano-estadounidense) es un artista, educador y organizador comunitario cuyo trabajo transforma las ciudades en lienzos de imaginación colectiva. Residente en Brooklyn, es el Artista del Pueblo inaugural de la ciudad de Nueva York y fundador del People’s Creative Institute, un estudio cívico radical que utiliza el arte para encender la pertenencia y reimaginar la democracia.
Arquitecto de formación, Yazmany aborda el espacio público como terreno sagrado para contar historias. Durante más de dos décadas, ha concebido y dirigido proyectos artísticos participativos a gran escala en los cinco continentes -incluidos Sudáfrica, Afganistán, India, Colombia y Estados Unidos-, a menudo en respuesta a la crisis, la desconexión y la invisibilidad sistémica. Sus materias primas son las personas, los lugares y el valiente acto de soñar juntos.
En 2022, fue productor cultural de Little Amal Walks NYC, una procesión por toda la ciudad que invitó a más de 100.000 neoyorquinos a compartir un ritual en torno a la migración, la memoria y la esperanza. Es asesor artístico principal de la Community Arts Network y ha recibido encargos de instituciones como el Carnegie Hall, la Universidad de Yale, las Naciones Unidas y el BRIC.
Yazmany cree que el arte es un verbo, una fuerza viva que nos invita a una relación más profunda entre nosotros y con el mundo que estamos construyendo. Su obra vive en la intersección entre el gobierno, la comunidad y la poesía, y plantea preguntas luminosas y urgentes: ¿Adónde vamos para practicar la imaginación? ¿Cómo lo hacemos juntos?
Enseña en la Facultad de Arquitectura, Arte y Planificación de la Universidad de Cornell. Su vida, marcada por la emigración, el dolor, la resistencia y la alegría radical, sigue dando forma a una práctica en constante evolución.
artist statement
At the heart of my practice is the idea that art is a verb, not a noun. It is something we do, and something we see. I believe that art is a universal language of invention and agency, through which we define and redefine culture, express our shared experience and envision all possibilities.
When I was eleven years old and simplifying fractions in the middle of a school day in Colombia, my father was murdered at a nearby gas station. Four men on motorcycles, armed with machine guns, sprayed bullets into him while he was pumping gas into his tank. Ever since then, when I draw or paint or laugh in the company of others, I feel him with me, and I am eleven again.
It was through art that I had a safe space to experiment and question. It gave me the capacity to understand who I am, a continuously transforming creature, learning every day. So far I haven’t been able to find another word that gives room for this kind of expansiveness. I want others to believe that art is that too – for me, for them, for us.
In dialogue with others I use video, painting, photography, and other media to orchestrate elaborate, alternate realities that challenge certainties and unmask prejudices that lie just outside our collective field of vision.
However, if that’s not the case you are in, chances are you will lose, thus creating levitra uk downtownsault.org a new dilemma.
declaracion del artista
En el corazón de mi practica esta la idea que el arte es un verbo, no un nombre. Es algo que hacemos, y algo que vemos. Creo que el arte es un lenguaje universal de invención y agencia, a través del cual nosotros definimos re-definimos la cultura, expresamos, compartimos y visionamos todas las posibilidades.
Cuando tenía once años de edad, en medio de un dia de escuela en Colombia, mi padre fue asesinado cerca a una estación de gas. Cuatro hombres en motocicletas, con armas de fuego, dispararon contra él mientras ponía gasolina a su tanque. Desde entonces, cuando dibujo, pinto o río en compañía de otros, siempre lo siento conmigo, y regreso a mis once años de edad.
Fue a través del arte que yo encontré un espacio seguro para experimentar y cuestionar. Me dio la capacidad de entender quien soy, una criatura en continua transformación, que cada día aprende más. Hasta el momento no he podido encontrar otra palabra que me de espacio suficiente para este tipo de libertad. Quiero que otros crean que el arte también es eso – para mi, para ellos, para nosotros.
En los diálogos con las personas, empleo herramientas audiovisuales, pinturas, fotografías, y otros medios para articular y elaborar realidades alternas que retan las convicciones y desenmascaran prejuicios que se se encuentran justo en la periferia de nuestro campo visual.
ART AND THE CITY
Yazmany, along with collaborator Nabila Alibhai, co-authored the first chapter of “Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape (Routledge Critical Studies in Urbanism and the City).” Artistic practices have long been disturbing the relationships between art and space. They have challenged the boundaries of performer/spectator, of public/private, introduced intervention and installation, ephemerality and performance, and constantly sought out new modes of distressing expectations about what is construed as art. But when we expand the world in which we look at art, how does this change our understanding of critical artistic practice?
This book presents a global perspective on the relationship between art and the city. International and leading scholars and artists themselves present critical theory and practice of contemporary art as a politicised force. It extends thinking on contemporary arts practices in the urban and political context of protest and social resilience and offers the prism of a ‘critical artscape’ in which to view the urgent interaction of arts and the urban politic. The global appeal of the book is established through the general topic as well as the specific chapters, which are geographically, socially, politically and professionally varied. Contributing authors come from many different institutional and anti-institutional perspectives from across the world.