"Off-Duty Militias", 2008, Acrylic, pencil, ink, foam, photograph collage on canvas, 24" x 34" x 1/2" (Collection of the artist).

Priscila De Carvalho creates a work that combines various media including acrylic, vinyl, permanent marker, pencil, and photo collage. In her imagery, Ms. De Carvalho creates fantastic worlds in which colors, forms and elements of fantasy all meld together. The work combines the influence of Pop Art, Spanish Informalism, the monumentality of mural painting, and a reverence for architectural forms. With these varied sources, the artist overlays a complex variety of objects and shapes together, creating a frenetic, laden, urban landscape.

She is perhaps most inspired by the ever-expanding and sprawling urban growth in the cities of her native Brazil. Revealing the sense of a huge population constantly on the move, her works are marked by intense colors and the lines of ever-present winding streets and stairways.

In her piece "Off Duty Militias," she was inspired by the drug related traffic in the slums in Brazil and innate (or inherent) theme of wall-building, connoting human-separation amid chaotic fences and watchtowers, which directly relate to current US-border issues along the Rio Grande and Sonoran Desert.

Priscila De Carvalho was born in Brazil in 1975; she studied at the City College of San Francisco, the UC Berkeley and at the Art Student League in New York. Ms. De Carvalho is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship Award (2008-09), Artist in the Market Place program at Bronx Museum (2009), Sculpture Space Residency and Fellowship Award (2010), Queens Council on The Arts Fund (2009), the Aljira Emerge 10 Fellowship (2008) and has been nominated for The Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art program in New York, NY (2010). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in the US and internationally, including the Jersey City Museum, Praxis International Art Gallery in New York, Gallery 64 Bis in Paris, France and in group exhibitions such as The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, Deutsche Bank and various other galleries and museums. In 2011, she will participate in the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum Biennial and at the (S) Files, The Biennial of El Museo del Barrio, New York City, NY. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times (August 2009), Art Aldia International (March 09), Art Nexus (August 2009) and many others. Ms. De Carvalho lives and works New York City.

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