Nicolás Dumit Estévez interview

In 2015, on the occasion of the publication of the "States of Devotion" issue of e-misférica, Marcial Godoy-Anativia interviewed Dominican artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez at the Hemispheric Institute. They discuss Dumit Estévez' long-standing engagement with religion in his work, and how his relationship towards it becomes ever more earnest. They also talk about his education at the Union Theological Seminary, his decision to live in the South Bronx, his Lebanese heritage, and his introduction to queerness through Afro-Caribbean religion. They touch on his works La Papamóvil, The Flag/La Bandera (which Dumit Estévez describes as the "Dominican York Flag"), El Santo Niño de Praga, and a project then in-development he was calling "Becoming Puerto Rican."

Nicolás Dumit Estévez treads an elusive route that manifests itself performatively or through experiences where the quotidian and art overlap. Concurrently, this path has been informed by a strong personal interest in immigration, cultural hybridization and Estévez's understanding of identity as a process always in flux. He hence approaches the concepts of home and belonging to the U.S. American context from the perspective of a Lebanese-Dominican, Dominican York who was recently baptized as a Bronxite: a citizen of the Bronx. While ephemeral by nature, Estévez's work gains permanence through audios, photographs, props, drawings, rumors, embodied memories, costumes, websites, videos and publications. Publications include Pleased to Meet You, Life as Material for Art and Vice Versa (editor) and For Art's Sake. Estévez Holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, where he studied with Coco Fusco; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Estévez lives and works in the Bronx