Bio:
Jo Cosme is a queer Boricua (Native Puerto Rican) multimedia artist who was displaced to Seattle a year after Hurricane María in 2018. In Puerto Rico, she worked making queer-centered art to raise awareness on what it's like to live in a queer body on the archipelago, but once in Seattle, she changed her focus. Because she was so shocked by how little North Americans know about Borikén (colonially known as Puerto Rico), this inspired her to create works that provoke reflections on the effects of disaster capitalism and neocolonialism in her Homeland, the World's oldest Colony.
Cosme completed her BFA at Puerto Rico's School of Fine Arts majoring in photography in 2014. Her work’s been exhibited in places such as Museo las Américas (PR), Photographic Center Northwest (WA), and Galerie Rivoli 59 (Paris). She's won multiple awards in select galleries across the continental US and has also been invited to give art talks at Shunpike's ACES program, Allied Media Conference (Detroit), and MIT Game Lab to name a few. By 2022, she was awarded the new project grant from Northwest Film Forum’s Collective Power Fund + Andy Warhol Foundation (Seattle) and the GAP award from Artist Trust (Seattle). She was also granted the Puerto Rican Artist fellowship program at MASS MoCA's A4A Residency, where she started working on her first solo show titled: Welcome to Paradise. This project is an immersive installation exploring the contrasting relationship between United Statesians’ perception of Puerto Rico as a Caribbean paradise compared to what its Native population has endured for generations. Showing this project in the continental US will serve as a call to action to raise awareness on US Imperialism and how Global North folks unknowingly perpetuate neocolonialism in places such as the Caribbean. This show will open in Gallery 4Culture on March 7, 2024.