Pride - Using Color to Celebrate Identity with Ijania Cortez

Ijania Cortez (b Detroit MI 1990) is a fine artist living and working in Detroit MI, USA. A self-taught artist, her practice is centralized around painting but also includes murals as well as works of mixed media. She is known for the color she uses in her portraits as well as the subjects, exclusively depicting black men from the inner city. Influenced by a modest childhood in 90’s Detroit and her love for the residents there, her work serves to create conversations between painting and viewer. In her practice Cortez uses neon color to note the modern era, showing her subjects as natural and central in environments that are unnatural, a reflection of the man-made conditions of the city. Her work interrogates beauty and vulnerability in masculinity, as well as the ability to thrive and existence despite adversity. She hosted her first solo exhibition, A Summer Nativity, in July 2017.