Mildred Beltré is a multi-disciplinary artist invested in grassroots activism, social justice, and political movements. Beltré’s art spans photography, print-making, drawing, text-based formats, and fiber arts. Across these diverse mediums, Beltré carries forth an interest and investment in political movements and their associated social relations and structures.
Using text and the body, her most recent work involves looking at revolutionary praxis through the experience of the everyday. Her organizing work has focused on popular education, public housing, and abolition. She co-founded the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine (BHAM) in 2010 with Oasa DuVerney, an arts initiative in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that addresses gentrification and community building. She has worked as a teaching artist for El Museo Del Barrio, Henry Street Settlement, and the New York City Housing Authority, where she coordinated an art program bringing artists to Community and Senior centers in all five boroughs.
She has been a member of Sister Fire (an activist organization of women of color) and La Escuela Popular Norteña (a popular education folk school). As part of that work, Beltre participated in creating the Harm Free Zone Project, a collaboration between Critical Resistance’s New York chapter and the popular education collective La Escuela Popular Norteña in the early 2000s. The Harm Free Zone Project provided tools and training to local communities to strengthen and develop our ability to confront and transform state violence, intra-social conflict, and interpersonal conflict.
Currently, she is a Professor in Studio Art at the University of Vermont. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Apex Art, BRIC, Lower East Side Printshop, Vermont Studio Center and the Santa Fe Art Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Brooklyn Foundation and the Rema Hort Foundation, among others.
“The funds from NALAC will help me finally realize a project I have thought about for over a decade.”