Polymer Polyps, Catholic Cicadas, and Drag Dryads: the Metamorphic Work of Raúl de Nieves

“I’ve learned that asking for help can be transformative,” Raúl de Nieves says in a tone that makes the statement itself sound almost like a pleading question posed to the group assembled for his artist talk at the Baltimore Museum of Art. “It’s a way to grow,” he clarifies more definitively. “In life we are constantly not realizing how much help is around us. Finding it becomes a catalyst for growth.”

We’re standing on the second floor of the BMA’s East Lobby, in the midst of the prolific artist’s epic installation and imagine you are here. Considering the scope and detail of the various maximalist objects and interventions on display, it’s easy to see why de Nieves might need an extra hand. Twenty-seven panels of meticulously cut, layered, aluminum-taped, and resin-enforced colorful acetate panels create the illusion of biophilic stained glass windows above.

Five ornately beaded (and sometimes otherwise adorned) mutant statues sit, lurk, dance, or stand across the two levels. Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine tiny clear resin insects—each containing a strand of the artist’s own hair and assortment of his trademark colorful beads—swarm across the walls of the double-height space. Presiding over it all is a glittery humanoid figure suspended in a chandelier cocoon, meeting visitors’ curious gazes with a mask-like grin.

It’s an ambitious hang in a tricky space and represents the sophomore Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission. The program, established in 2018, pairs curators from underrepresented backgrounds with international contemporary artists to commission new, publicly accessible works for the BMA’s lofty East Lobby.

The first, 2019’s Mickalene Thomas: A Moment’s Pleasure, saw a total, set-like makeover of the museum entrance to evoke vernacular domestic architecture. It was produced in collaboration with the inaugural curatorial fellow Cynthia Hodge-Thorne who also worked with Leila Grothe, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, on de Nieves’ project.

Like the lobby’s first iteration, and imagine you are here also feels theatrical. But instead of completely disguising the space, the work centers the transformations undergone by the cast of the mise-en-scène, working in tandem with the architecture of the site. The grid of faux-stained-glass windows project colorful shadows across the lobby, which gradually shift with the sun and dance across the sculptures like reflections from a slow-moving disco ball. They depict frogs, monarch butterflies, and the region’s infamous Brood X cicadas—all animals that undergo drastic metamorphosis in their lifespans.

In the center of the composition, a crested caracara falcon takes flight. Is the bird a symbol of freedom? Or a predator swooping down to snatch the creatures lower on the food chain in their vulnerable states of transition? Is this cathedral-like tableau in memoriam of the martyred critters? Or perhaps they’re all part of the same cycle: birth, transformation, migration, reproduction, and death.

The falcon came to de Nieves in a dream and its inclusion adds another layer to an installation of ambiguous contradictions. Scale and proximity shift, with massive 2D grasshoppers towering above tiny blink-and-you-miss-them translucent 3D flies. The beaded statues feel like human/coral/fungus hybrids—utterly alien but seldom threatening. They project fragility, but two of the more overtly figurative ones invite visitors to sit beside them on benches to discover they’re actually protected by a hard exoskeleton of resin.

The most dynamic or ornate are positioned on a mirrored platform inaccessible to visitors—an abstract contortion of limbs that could be dancers in a vogue ball or something struggling to emerge from a chrysalis—their meticulously detailed surfaces out of reach for closer appreciation. The flies hold both the artist’s actual DNA and mass-produced plastic beads. The forms and imagery are all organic, but rendered in toxic technicolor materials. They’re all the kind of dualities one might encounter in the work of an artist who cites both Catholic canon and drag queen subculture as complimentary influences in the same breath, no traces of irony detectable.

I’ve always been around non-binary people. Growing up in the early 2000s in San Francisco allowed me to understand how beautiful queer relationships can inspire one another.

Raul de Nieves

Raúl de Nieves was born in Michoacán, Mexico in 1983. As a child, his family taught him both traditional crafts such as beadwork and a deep appreciation for nature. “When we were little my family would share all the wonders of Mexico,” he explains.

The forest-covered and lake-dappled state of Michoacán, just outside the urban chaos and cosmopolitan glamor of the Mexico City metropolitan area, is famous for its traditions of costume, masked dancers, and expansive monarch butterfly reserves. The monarchs have an idiosyncratic, generational migratory pattern—one generation is born in the forests of Michoacán, and when ready, begin a journey towards the United States.

Their children and grandchildren continue thousands of kilometers north as far as Canada, and when their descendents get their wings, they instinctively head “home” to the Mexican mountains before the next winter to repeat the cycle.

In Michoacán, where many families have been impacted by the mass emigration of working-age men to the United States or urban areas, the monarchs have taken on a special significance as symbols of resilience for the ever more matriarchal local culture. “The butterflies created such movement in color and you could literally feel their wings flap next to you,” de Nieves recalls of his childhood with family members, “Sharing these memories together always gave us a beautiful understanding of what migration meant.”

The de Nieves family ended up migrating too, following the tragic death of Raúl’s father and his mother’s decision to move to California when the artist was nine years old. There’s a vein of displacement, adaptation, hybrid identification, and escapist play one might trace back through de Nieves’ œuvre to this time of difficult transitions. But his experiences in California also added another influence to the artist’s encyclopedic library of inspiration: “My friendships… I’ve always been around non-binary people. Growing up in the early 2000s in San Francisco allowed me to understand how beautiful queer relationships can inspire one another.”

Despite being accepted into the California College of the Arts, de Nieves decided against a formal education at a pricey art school. Instead, he thrust himself directly into the gallery, performance, and nightlife scenes. The artist migrated once again, moving to New York in 2006, where he found a like-minded melting pot of friends, collaborators, and professional contacts in the heyday of Bushwick’s raucous DIY glow-up. To this day, de Nieves cites his long-running collaborations with the queer artist and nightlife personality Gage Spex as fundamental to his practice.

That community remains a vital part of de Nieve’s inspiration and studio family. “When I am making these pieces, I’m working with trans and nonbinary artists, who teach me so much.” When I first met de Nieves years ago, his more solitary, labor-intensive studio practice often required a year or more to fabricate one piece. I ask him if his status as an in-demand artist necessitates working with production assistants, and how that’s changed the work beyond just scale, volume, and speed. “I don’t think of the people that help me make work as assistants,” he replies, “I think we truly become a collective when it comes to making. My work does derive from a very time-based practice so everyone has to be in the right mindset to see the work grow. Slowly we see changes but, of course, this time becomes so important. I’m also around others that are thinking about the idea of how when gender never stops developing we truly grow into beautiful beings. I feel very lucky to have these relationships with my peers and that we can help one another.”

There’s a decidedly non-binary approach to de Nieve’s process—which often begins with the desire to upcycle something like mannequin limbs, broken high heels, or textiles, and sometimes involves a performance or garment element. The artist and his collaborators slowly, intuitively build up surfaces with layers of beads, glue, found objects, and rhinestones or glitter. “I think because of the materials I use I’m always trying to find a way to bend the rules,” he explains, “My process can be simple yet super complicated… this is why I see so much transformation in the works.”

The results are lumpy, dazzling, amorphous forms. From some angles a piece might resemble an anthropomorphic coral reef akimbo in some silent vogue battle through the window with the BMA’s beloved Joel Shapiro sculpture outside. Others, dressed in feathered and embroidered regalia, exist somewhere between clowns, shamans, genderless deities, or humans molting off one layer of skin to reveal something more fantastic beneath.

Some surfaces give the impression of colorful fungus or lichen consuming the figure beneath, or perhaps just coexisting. What would a mutually beneficial symbiosis between a human epidermis and a lichen look like? I find myself wondering as I stare at a patch of acerbic fuchsia beads. Maybe the benevolent parasite would exfoliate your skin, and make a humid microclimate to lock in moisture? That might be one of the most bizarre thoughts I’ve ever entertained in the midst of an exhibition, and that’s a good sign. Art that’s joyously, unabashedly weird enough to make you ask questions you’ve never considered is also “a catalyst for growth.”

Standing in and imagine you are here, I’m comforted to know I’m not alone in my strange, curious reveries. Later, in an editorial conversation, Cara Ober later asks me, “Do you think caterpillars are nervous or scared when they know they have to go through a metamorphosis? Does it hurt to become a butterfly?”

I pass this question on to Raúl de Nieves. “It’s hard to imagine what the insects think or feel but I do like to wonder what they feel the most,” he replies. “It’s like us—we have to have major life breakthroughs, either with gains or losses. But somehow overcoming becomes a new form of thinking and adapting.”