Interview with Armando Lopez-Bircann
By hola | Published | No Comments
Photo by Carol Antezana
D.C.-based artist Armando Lopez-Bircann grew up in the Dominican Republic, without much access to art museums. But thanks to an art-loving family and internet access to the so-called global village and the queer world beyond Caribbean shores, Lopez-Bircann has developed an innovative, technologically driven way of creating art.
As a queer Latinx artist who uses they/them pronouns, Lopez-Bircann is pushing back on society’s boundaries. Through their art, they test the limits of queer Latinx expression.
Lopez-Bircann, 32, has spent much of their professional career in the D.C. area and has held artist fellowships from the D.C. Commission for the Arts & Humanities. They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from Corcoran College of Art and Design.
Lopez-Bircann creates digital drag, digital wearable sculptures, 3D-printed wearable sculptures, and even some music. For example, they created Augmented Reality oracle wearable artwork through queer and ecofeminism lenses. The artwork is printed on fabric.
Growing up in an art-positive environment, Lopez-Bircann started learning what inspired them creatively at a young age. Lopez-Bircann enjoys creating all-encompassing artistic experiences that people can absorb and appreciate. They use symbolism to allow the viewers to individually interpret and interact with their work, incorporating symbolism from churches, Tarot, and science fiction. Armando Lopez-Bircann creates art that supports the queer Latinx community in the D.C. area, nationwide, and worldwide, one piece at a time.
How did you become an artist?
My family, early on, was very art-positive. My dad is an architect. He went to school in the ’70s, when it was pre-digital. His job was to make the renderings, watercolors, and technical perspective drawings. It’s something computers took over [doing] in the ‘90s. He always understood art as a trade and as work. That was something that he and my family encouraged in general. I developed talent through that encouragement from my parents. They were proud of being able to make stuff and of him being an architect.
For me, I found so much joy in the arts, personally, in my downtime. It wasn’t really escapism as a kid: it was empowerment. It connected me culturally to the rest of the world, because I grew up with globalization, with the internet as a teenager or preteen, so the arts always connected me to empowerment and something that I could give other people.
I can see that in your art. I’ve looked at your portfolio and can see that empowerment and real passion, so that’s super cool.
Why did you want to take a gender fluid, Latinx, queer, ecofeminist approach to your art?
I always had feminine culture as my favorite; it makes me have a trans experience. Dressing up and a lot of fashion influences that I had were things I saw on the internet [that] centered around music and visual arts. There were club kids who were very queer and androgynous and taking [up] the torch of what happened in the ’70s and ’80s. This was in the early 2000s. So, I always saw very queer people being themselves, even though I felt like the only one where I grew up in the Dominican Republic. There was always a part of me that knew I wasn’t wrong or I knew I could nurture [myself] through the arts. I’ve always been gender fluid and have done all the gay sorts of things, like being a gogo boy turned drag queen and then finding myself in fine art spaces doing queer performance or art-making for people who weren’t necessarily queer, which was interesting.
I have dual citizenship, so I was able to come here for school [after] I grew up in a resort area in the Dominican Republic. I was very connected to the outdoors. It was a family thing, too. I grew up sailing and going to the beach three or four times a week. I was very connected to the local coastal environment. Also, my family’s from a pine forest, mountainous region, so we went camping.
In these last 12 years or so, since I came [to the United States] for college, I’ve seen the environment change a lot. There’s a lot of things that I just love about queer expression and the power that musicians, drag queens, drag kings, [and] drag artists have to create value — cultural value. [They] give value to things through the celebration of beauty and visual art [as] sort of just design principles. So mixing queer liberation and queer ecofeminism explained a lot of colonial sort of cultural trauma that I experienced growing up, which informs my art. For instance, gay men are called pájaros (birds) in the Dominican Republic. That’s a colonial strategy to dehumanize queer people of color, turn them into animals, and take their rights away. Reclaiming terms like that [through] an ecofeminist lens looks at all those strategies that date back to witch burnings. It all explains a lot of things that I did intuitively [understand]. Then it kind of led me to creating something cute.
I’ve been doing this sort of drag digitally now. It’s just more sustainable. I’m trying to use themes of making environmentalism cool, making people think about it more, and reflect on it, because art expresses those values of environmental sustainability.
Where do you find your inspiration for the symbolism in your art?
Some of the [world’s] earliest experiences of art were in places like churches and beautiful temples. I didn’t grow up in a place that had an art museum, so the closest experience was the feeling of awe when you see symbols that tell stories that you’ve been taught. Things like tarot or oracle decks have also been an inspiration. It’s interesting to dig into my favorite things and not apologize for what those are. I’ve always known who I was — and we all do — but when you start seeing why those things were appealing to you, you know your connection.
A lot of my inspiration is from pop culture. Very visual musicians like Björk have helped me and been therapeutic. Some of my favorite things also include other divas and people who are involved in the [creative] process and use magical realism to tell very normal stories, making them fantastical or even sci-fi. The augmented reality filters or videos that I use feel very futuristic. I’m using a sort of utopian aesthetic to talk about dystopia, like problems that we have, or futures that we imagine.
I definitely can see that fantastic element in your work and the surrealism for sure. That’s really cool. I’m gonna shift gears here.
What does it mean for you to be an artist that represents the queer Latinx community?
Queerness is a definition that changes over time, depending on what is considered mainstream or what is popular. To have ecofeminist values is to [make] decisions through a value system of caring, which is outside of the norm. With things like “Rupaul’s Drag Race” and awareness about people with different gender identities, there’s this other aspect tied into empowering it through capitalism. [In other words,] what it means to be successful in these mainstream systems. A lot of it involves things that aren’t sustainable — that are damaging to our future in general, right? I’m so glad we’re having this view of gender and sexuality, sort of like a renaissance in general and [in the] culture.There’s still a lot of work to be done. I feel that there are a lot of people like me who don’t get featured in these spaces for a lot of different reasons.
There are a lot of alternatives to the Latinx experience. I’m just trying to be as authentic to my experience, whether or not that means at times [that] I’m a cliché. But I’m also showing that I’m a Dominican queer — that Dominican people are high tech and in the avant-garde of media. [They] understand the current landscape on the internet. Because a lot of the narratives around the Dominican Republic and people like me is that we’re stuck 300 years in the past.
I’ve always sort of been in a state of survival. Through my art, I hope I’m able to be vulnerable enough to let people know that it’s a struggle. Sometimes you may need to make tough decisions or sacrifices, but you need to ultimately trust your gut and keep moving in a direction. I don’t have a really big reach with my artwork at the moment, but you never know where it could go. I guess I’m just existing in these spaces; we’re sort of carving out this niche. I’ve felt a lot that nobody gets me or my work — nobody cares. I feel like the only person in the room who is a Latinx queer person. It’s been really hard for me to find a community. So in a way, I’m also reaching out to become more specific to draw that community in. The older I get, I really want to draw in people like you, like Hola Cultura, and really dig into these things. For 10 years, I haven’t been able to.
Was there a specific project when you felt that it was especially powerful to you and you knew you wanted to move forward with these types of projects?
Before I went to college, I went to community college and just took a class or two while I started working at art galleries. Going to art fairs and realizing there’s a world of art and I’m already in it made me take more seriously the possibility [of] being an artist full time. I went to college and focused on fine art at the Corcoran, which had a very small school with like 500 students. It was an intimate setting with professional artists who were realistic about the expectations of being an artist.
I started making these bird outfits — pájaro outfits — because people always made me feel like I was feminine in a bad way. So I started making these bird outfits that would just open up in society and become successful. I was really interested in getting paid for my time and not for things I made. I’m not interested in making luxury commodities which led me to performance art. I used to make a lot of videos. People would pay me to show up at events in my wearable art. That was successful for a while. Then I had to stop because it wasn’t sustainable materially and economically. Back in 2013, there weren’t a lot of eco-friendly options for the kind of work I was doing without making it super duper expensive. The way I do digital stuff now has led me on this other path. The wearable art sculpture is now digital, but it feels very much the same.
I see you kind of as a social activist as well. Is there anybody specifically who has inspired your social activism?
Some of the music I listened to growing up and the songs of the ’70s that were about social problems. There were a lot of very sex-positive people on MySpace like Rita Indiana, a Dominican musician, and even Shakira, right at the beginning with her album “¿Dónde Están los Ladrones?” In that version, Shakira is calling out all the woes of society. Then people like Björk were also pushing human aesthetics and connections to other aesthetics. She’s always had this sort of biomimicry in the work she produces. Recently, people like Princess Nokia [are] doing amazing work. They’re doing great cultural work and addressing indigeneity in the Caribbean. People like Lido Pimienta are also amazing in the way they are creating new values in the traditional indigenous culture and writing songs that have different values other than just the consumer kind — like wealth. It’s a little strange, because even though I work a lot with visual arts, a lot of my references are musicians.
Overall, what do you want people in the queer Latinx community to feel, or what else would you want them to take away?
I want to hear what they have to say. I feel like a lot of the stuff I create is created very authentically. It’s what I want, and what I like and enjoy. It feels very niche to me, but I need to trust it because of a great piece of advice I’ve heard from other artists: If you’re specific to your experience and what you like aesthetically and what you value culturally, more people will relate to it. It’s counterintuitive. That’s one of the things about art school: You hear things you didn’t expect [but] are valid about your work. It helps you grow, because then you have more to think about next time you create. I hope people enjoy it, and they want to see it again. I’m someone who watches music videos on YouTube for fun. I like to create stuff that’s kind of fun and informational too.
What do you want people who are not in the Latinx queer community to take from your art?
Photo by Sara Stadtmiller
I’m trying to get to a place where I don’t need to explain it anymore. I’ve stopped making stuff in Spanish for a while because nobody spoke Spanish in the spaces where I was getting hired or the music was getting played. I’m still trying to communicate my feelings and ambivalent perspectives or stories about [my] lived experiences. I guess if you don’t get it, it’s not bad. I don’t worry about it.
I had such a hard time connecting through my artwork to other people. It’s been a survival thing for me. It’s been my skill and what gives me worth [and] work. I’d like that to continue to grow. I’m trying to make stuff that is also just enjoyable at a senses level, right? Where it just sounds good — the music sounds good. You can tell it’s sad and something’s happening or he’s lost something. I’m trying to get to that level where most people can enjoy it for just beauty or for what it is.
Would you like to inspire young queer Latinx artists to be innovative?
It’s something I’ve been working on. I’m ready to share a lot of my process and how I do the things I do, because it’s not really out there. During the pandemic, at the beginning of it, all this technology became consumer available. As long as you could get a connection to the internet, you could participate and get those skills. A lot of what I use is either “free,” [though not completely] because they have your own data, or it’s open source [so your creations are freely accessible to everyone]. There are a lot of software development communities and free resources. You can do professional grade work with free resources. If you have the time, there are a lot of ways to empower yourself through digital work.
The other thing is to trust your gut, pivot, and fail fast. If something isn’t working, no matter how much time you spend on it, figure out why and try to change it, or find something that’s similar. If it’s bad for your health — mentally and physically — stop, pivot, and try to find a way to make it work for you.
Also, take care of your body. Get an ergonomic mouse and keyboard so you don’t end up with carpal tunnel [syndrome] like me.
Stay Up-to-Date with Lopez-Bircann & Their Art
Website: shoparmadura.com
Social Media: Instagram.com/arma.dura
*This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
– Olivia Drey
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