Angelita Alves is an award-winning artist and designer. Born in Brazil and of mixed European, African, and Indigenous heritage, her work is deeply rooted in questions of identity and belonging. Having lived across North and South America, the Middle East...
Read MoreAngelita Alves is an award-winning artist and designer. Born in Brazil and of mixed European, African, and Indigenous heritage, her work is deeply rooted in questions of identity and belonging. Having lived across North and South America, the Middle East and Europe, Angelita brings a distinctly global perspective to her artistic practice. Her multicultural background shaped a body of work that explores the tensions of displacement, immigration, and cultural memory.
Angelita is a current awardee at Cockpit Arts, receiving subsidized studio space, incubation program and personalized art career coaching. She studied architecture at the University of Greenwich and the Royal College of Art in London, and Columbia University in New York. Over a 20-year career, she worked with world-renowned architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Norman Foster. Though architecture profoundly influenced her sense of form and structure, she felt an increasing pull toward more personal forms of expression. This led her to study Fine Art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, eventually returning to her creative roots through textile-based sculpture and installation.
Weaving and knotting—an ancestral craft passed down from her father—became her medium of choice, a tactile language through which she explores loss, miscegenation, and the reclamation of cultural narratives. Everyday materials are reinterpreted to challenge conventional definitions of utility and beauty, transforming objects into vessels of memory and meaning.
