Jesús Hilario-Reyes
Biography
Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Jesús Hilario-Reyes (San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an antidisciplinary artist with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters in Sculpture from Yale University. Recently, a recipient of Cultured Mag Young Artist’s List (2025), L’Officiel Artist to Watch List (2025), Drawing a Blank Artist Grant, the Leslie Lohman Museum Fellowship (2021), the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2022), and the Bemis Center Residency (2022) program. Jesús Hilario-Reyes has exhibited/screened/performed most notably at Hauser and Wirth, Company Gallery, Silke Linder, Jack Barret Gallery, Fragment Gallery, Project for Empty Space, Salma Sarriedine, BOFFO Performance Festival (Fire Island), Frieze (London), e-Flux (NYC), Gladstone Gallery (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Star Film Festival (Philadelphia, PN), Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Rudimento (Quito, ECUA), Parasol Unit (London, UK), and Gladstone Gallery (NYC). Primarily rooted in sculpture, their practice navigates the intersections of sonic performance, land-based installation, and expanded cinema.
Statement
Through iterative engagements with carnival and rave culture across the West, Hilario-Reyes takes a reparative approach to the concept of destierro—an untranslatable Spanish term akin to being "torn from the land." They use this concept to explore Black and Queer fugitivity, examining the im/possibility of the Black body and its entanglement with photographic and cinematic optics. Informed by an evolving engagement with sound systems, lighting, and atmospherics within nightscapes such as clubs and raves, their work transforms tools of urgency—like the siren—into modes of embodiment and transcendence. Hilario-Reyes embraces masquerade, satire, and spectacle as strategies to interrogate systems of hypervisibility, while their object- and installation-based practices reflect a broader search for belonging within states of flux. These environments gesture toward the Blur: a shifting space of refusal, resonance, and recontextualized materiality.
Jesus joins The Clemente Artists in Residence as a 2026-27 Van Lier Fellow, a new program launched with support from the New York Community Trust.
Studio 517
