Lizania Cruz (b. 1983) is a Dominican participatory artist and designer who investigates how migration affects the ways of being and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration.
Lizania Cruz: Performing Inquiry explores the artist’s investigation of the complex histories of the Caribbean, West Africa, and the United States, spanning Afro-religious practices, slavery, migration, colonialism, and nationhood.
Cruz is currently working on the Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary, a participatory research-based art project that examines how the nation-state of the Dominican Republic has repressed and erased African heritage in the Dominican imagination.
Performing Inquiry continues Cruz’s body of work in the Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary. This exhibition focuses on the history of the peninsula of Samaná in the Dominican Republic and its connection to the African diaspora via the United States. Cruz uses inquiry as a tool, a medium, and a form through which oral history, archival research, and the documentation of a staged public performance of El Bamboulá (2022) are presented together. This investigation moves away from the colonial understanding of history as linear, and instead approaches it as a pluralist narrative that conflates the past, present, and future.
Lizania Cruz: Performing Inquiry is organized by Kilolo Luckett, executive director and chief curator, in collaboration with Lizania Cruz; exhibition installation was handled with care by Camila Centeno Bonnet, exhibition and digital content manager, and Marco Femiani, gallery and studio manager.
