Victoria Ravelo

Born in Miami to Cuban exiles, artist Victoria Ravelo explores the terrain of inherited nostalgia and diasporic identity through intuitive work with everyday materials, photographs, and objects tied to Pre-Hispanic and West African spiritual traditions. Creating tangible artifacts that bridge generations, Ravelo's drawings, photographs, sculptures, and installations transform absence into presence, inviting viewers to experience how places can feel simultaneously foreign and familiar. The work confronts the tensions of displacement without resolving them, instead creating portals where personal histories intertwine with collective memory and where cultural fragments become sites of potential healing.

  • Poceta de memoria and Untitled (Viñales), 2019

    These photographs were taken during the artist's first and, so far, only visit to Cuba to meet family. They were wheat-pasted onto pieces of wood and tile found in Philadelphia—materials that evoked the working-class aesthetics of Miami—creating small portals to a home the artist has never fully known. The photographs act as vessels for preserving memories of a place that lives more vividly in family stories than in personal experience.

    By layering Cuban imagery onto Philadelphia-found objects reminiscent of Miami, the work reflects an effort to access a heritage that feels both close and out of reach. The reclaimed, weathered materials speak to how time alters not only physical environments but also emotional connections to them.

    Through these pieces, the artist explores the complexities of inherited nostalgia—a longing for places and histories known only through others. The work becomes a means of crafting tangible artifacts that bridge generations and give form to a sense of belonging unbound by geography.

    A Study in Translation, 2020

    During the isolation of the lockdown period, the artist turned to Google Street View as a means of reminiscing and virtually exploring places that were physically out of reach. One image held particular significance—a chance Street View capture of the exact view in front of the artist’s mother’s childhood home in Cuba, a digital echo of a place central to the family’s history.

    The artist created solvent transfers of this image alongside two others: one of a location in Miami that reminded the mother of Cuba, and another of a place in Philadelphia that evoked a sense of home for the artist. These virtual explorations served as a substitute for physical presence, collapsing geographic and temporal boundaries through digital means.

    Together, these works examine the paradoxes of diaspora—how places can feel both distant and deeply familiar, how absence takes on its own presence, and how art can forge connections that transcend physical space

  • Poceta de memoria (Well of memory), 2019


    photocopy wheat pasted on reclaimed wood.

  • Untitled (Viñales), 2019

    Photocopy wheat pasted on reclaimed tile.

  • A Study in Translation, 2020

    Gel transfer Google Street View images of Miami, Baracoa (Cuba), and Philadelphia; acrylic, pen, human hair on watercolor paper.