Diana Eusebio doesn’t buy fabric dye to make her art; she picks Spanish moss from trees instead. A $25,000 prize will help her take her unique work to the next level.
Eusebio, a 25-year-old Miami-based fashion designer and multidisciplinary artist, was named this year’s YoungArts Jorge M. Pérez award winner at the YoungArts Miami Gala Saturday night. The $25,000 award is unrestricted, meaning she can do whatever she wants with the money.
YoungArts, a nonprofit that supports emerging artists, presents the award to artists that strengthen the community through their artwork. Pérez, an art collector, real estate developer and head of the Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation, said supporting young artists like Eusebio is an honor.
“Young artists and their creative endeavors hold the potential to inspire positive transformations not only within their immediate circles but throughout entire communities,” Pérez said in a statement. “We acknowledge the invaluable perspectives and narratives they bring forth, and we express our gratitude to YoungArts for their dedication in ensuring these talents receive the recognition they truly deserve.”
Eusebio has made a name for herself both in Miami’s art scene and internationally with her unique art practice. Her textile work combines digital photography with ancient fabric dying practices. She specializes in Latin American, Black and Indigenous techniques to pull vibrant colors from natural materials you can find in a South Florida backyard, like moss, avocado seeds and achiote.
READ MORE: This Miami artist weaves the Everglades, Peru and the Dominican Republic into her garments
She has been an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, at Red Hook Labs in New York, at AIRIE in the Everglades. She participated in the 2019 PRIZM Art Fair Photography Fellowship and the Edge Zones International Exchange Residency in the Dominican Republic. In 2016, when she was a senior in high school, she won the YoungArts award in Visual Arts and became a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts.
Her work has been exhibited in several art institutions and fairs, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hall of Nations at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Rubell Museum, Parsons The New School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, School of Visual Arts, and Palazzo Dei Cartelloni in Florence, Italy.
Her artwork is currently on view at “Bounce,” an art exhibition at Oolite Arts in Miami Beach, where she has her art studio.
“I have the space, the means and the time to really just hone in on my work,” Eusebio said. “It couldn’t have been a more perfect time for this [award] to happen.”
Eusebio, who is Peruvian and Dominican, grew up in the Redland interested in fine art, she said. The area she grew up in was largely agricultural, which means she only had one neighbor.
When she was 13, the neighbor told her mom about an art program nearby. Eusebio went into it thinking it was a fashion illustration class. Turns out, it was a technical course all about pattern making and clothing construction. Her mind was blown, she said.
“I didn’t abandon art, I combined it with design,” she said. “For me, it’s been a long time coming in terms of just like finding my style, finding my rhythm to my work.”
Eusebio was attending the Maryland Institute College of Art when she noticed something was missing in her studies. She was taking a class about natural dyes and how to use them, but the class said nothing about the cultures the materials come from, she said.
Take carmine, a naturally occurring red color that comes from the cochineal bug. When you add lime juice or baking soda, the red turns into a rainbow of pinks, purples, oranges and browns. Peru, where Eusebio’s mother is from, is the world’s largest exporter of cochineal bugs. Her mother would tell her stories of how European colonizers sought after the bug, how it was associated with royalty and how she would pick the little insects off the trees in her backyard to sell them at the market. Money literally grew on trees, she said.
“When I started learning about how to use it in in school, I felt like those things are missing like no one was telling us about where these dyes came from or what they meant. Why we have to treat them a certain way and not to waste them because they’re natural resources,” she said. “So after I graduated I dedicated my time to kind of supplementing my studies for myself.”
Since then, Eusebio has dived into the tedious task of researching ancient, Black and Indigenous practices, which were rarely documented. She applies what she learns to the artwork she creates and even the clothes she wore to the YoungArts Gala. Last fall, Eusebio taught a group of older adults from the Hialeah Housing Authority about natural dye techniques at the Perez Art Museum Miami for its “Creative Aging Series” of workshops.
The $25,000 prize will help Eusebio focus on artwork and research even more, she said. She plans to travel to Peru and do natural dye workshops to learn from the indigenous Quechua community, where her mother is from.
Grants like these help artists “create fearlessly” without having to worry about finances, she said.
“There’s just a lot of opportunities this year for me to just really just dive into my work and be focused and also just have fun with it,” she said.
This story was produced with financial support from The Pérez Family Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.
