Glendalys Medina is a conceptual interdisciplinary artist born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx. An MFA and BFA graduate of Hunter College, with additional studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Medina’s work spans performance, sculpture, drawing, and systems-based practice. Exhibitions include the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MACPR), El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Participant Inc., and Artists Space. Performances have been presented with Performa 19 and The Kitchen. Recognition includes the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, Jerome Hill Foundation Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Grant, and NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts. Residency affiliations include Artpace, Yaddo, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, and the Bronx Museum AIM program.Work is held in the collections of The Library of Congress, Google, MACPR, PAMM, Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, and MTA Arts & Design. Medina teaches in the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts.
My work emerges at the intersection of ritual, archive, and identity. Rooted in both conceptual art and Caribbean lineage, I construct systems—visual, linguistic, and spiritual—that reimagine how the self is shaped, fragmented, and remembered. What follows is not an artist statement in the traditional sense. It is a map. A rhythm. A ritual of return.
My practice is rooted in how humans create order out of chaos—how we project old knowledge onto new situations, and how perception itself is a ritual of pattern recognition. I’m interested in the moment when that pattern breaks, when something unfamiliar demands we see differently. My work seeks to rupture and rewire: to create experiences that reconfigure what we thought we knew. Through Taíno symbology, Hip-Hop cadence, personal development frameworks, and diasporic archives, I construct systems that challenge inherited narratives and invite new cognitive structures. This is not just about inclusion. It’s about recalibrating value systems—personal, cultural, spiritual—so that we can reimagine equity in a transcultural world.
These materials are not decorative—they’re devotions. String is lineage. Nail is sacrifice. Wire is both enclosure and electricity. They don’t just speak to cultural traditions; they’re extensions of the nervous system. When I work with them, I’m binding memory to matter. I’m encoding the body’s history into physical form. They hold tension. They hold breath. They hold the story the mouth was never allowed to speak. In my hands, they’re not just materials—they’re conduits. They carry ancestral memory, diasporic rupture, and the sacred labor of becoming.
Taíno culture isn’t a relic to me—it’s a rhythm. It lives in gesture, in silence, in survival. It shows up in how we mourn, how we cook, how we remember. I don’t excavate Taíno symbology as a historian—I resurrect it as a child of diaspora. This lineage gives me a mythic spine. It reminds me that memory isn’t always written—it’s ritualized. Artistically, it frees me from linear time. It lets me work in cycles, in echoes, in sacred repetitions. Personally, it helps me reclaim what was fragmented—not through nostalgia, but through re-invention. I’m not trying to go back. I’m trying to bring it forward.
The intuition comes first—the pressure in the chest, the image I can’t let go of. Then I build the structure that can hold it. Hip-hop taught me rhythm. Geometry taught me order. Poetry taught me omission. I start with the feeling. Then I codify the system. There’s a pattern logic to everything I make—whether it’s a sculpture, a sentence, or a ritual. Even my chaos is composed.
I was always the child who saw what wasn’t said. Who could feel the lie under the smile. When you grow up in a place where truth is slippery—where love and harm wear the same face—you start to ask deeper questions: What is real? What is inherited? What is mine? That’s where my practice begins. It’s not just philosophical—it’s spiritual. Because if I can dismantle the false truths I was given, I can help others do the same. I’m not just asking, “How do we know?” I’m asking, “Who gave us the story in the first place—and who benefits if we never question it?”
Performance is the moment the work breathes. When I’m in space with an audience, the piece stops being mine—it becomes ours. There’s a ritual transfer happening: I offer presence, and the audience responds with attention, silence, stillness, breath. It’s a mutual recognition. A moment where the unseen becomes undeniable. In performance, I’m not acting—I’m revealing. I use my body like punctuation: to press, to pause, to strike. And in doing so, the work becomes a spell—a temporary, sacred contract of witnessing.
The personal is the political—but I enter through the wound, not the banner. I’m not trying to make a statement—I’m trying to name what’s been unnamed. Migration isn’t just a concept—it’s a condition I live. Identity isn’t a theme—it’s a battlefield. Belonging isn’t assumed—it’s something I build, brick by ritual brick. So yes, these themes have political weight. But my entry point is always spiritual. Psychological. I don’t paint protest signs. I build maps for return.
In my practice, I’m not interested in spectacle. I’m interested in systems—of survival, of storytelling, of soul. These are not just artworks. They’re architectures. Blueprints for how we remember who we are, and rituals for how we reclaim it.