Priscilla Aleman is a visual artist based in Miami. With her background in archaeology, she uses sculpture and film to retrace ideas around the afterlife, Pre-Columbian cosmology, and the interplay of cultures from the Global South. Her work has been exhibited across the country and internationally at: The Smithsonian Museum of Art (Washington D.C.), The Bronx Museum (New York), New York Botanical Garden (New York), Soho House (Miami), Readytex Art (Suriname), Baker Hall (Miami), Art and Culture Center Hollywood (Florida), The Kampong (Miami), The Explorer’s Club (New York), and Virginia CommonWealth University (Richmond), and Baxter Street Camera Club (New York). Her most recent solo exhibition, We Are All Stars, was presented at YoungArts during Miami Art Week 2024. In 2022 she presented their first public art work in New York City commissioned by New York Botanical Garden.
Priscilla Aleman’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications including a feature-length interview in The New York Times: T Magazine as part of Legends and Heirs – Wangechi Mutu & Priscilla Aleman. Her practice has also been covered by Hyperallergic, Artforum, Columbia Magazine, and Musée Magazine, WWD Magazine, and was featured on the cover of WhiteWall Magazine for Miami Art Week 2024. Aleman is the recipient of the Mellon Research Fellowship at NYBG, The Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps Grant, and was recognized as a 2009 Presidential Scholar in the Arts. She has been awarded residencies at Mass MoCA, Fountainhead, LMCC, StoneLeaf, Bronx River Art Center and Baxter Street Camera Club. Aleman earned a BA with honors from The Cooper Union and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
The Smell of Banana Flowers
Mixed Clay Bodies, Hair, Collected Coffee Sacks, Banana Leaves, Coffee Grounds collected by family, Tea Leaves, Hurricane Tarps, Traveling Cases, National Geographic Magazines, Macaw Feathers, Painters Tape, Construction Fencing, Tropical Seeds, Color Cards, Beads, Cowrie Shells. Dimensions Variable.
The Smell of Banana Flowers reimagines the tropics not only as an ecological force, but as a metaphysical conduit—capable of transmitting memory, intuition, and transformation across generations. Inspired by my grandfather—a Cuban horticulturist whose life was shaped by tropical cultivation—the work unfolds as a bio-mythology: a living narrative shaped by ancestral memory, plant knowledge, and states of transformation.
Drawing directly from horticultural practices passed down to me:propagation, dancing, bundling plantain stalks, plaiting palm fibers,scattering fresh coffee grounds to the earth, among other inherited practices—these materials become tactile markers of care, evoking traditions fostered by deep ecological intimacy.
With my background in archaeology, I use performance and sculpture to retrace ideas around the afterlife, Pre-Columbian cosmology, and the interplay of cultures from the Global South. Citing the ocean as a connective tissue, I forge materials collected from related regions throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, incorporating a multitude of deep field research and work to push the process of recontextualizing old and new worlds.
