Francheska Alcántara
Francheska Alcántara is a queer Afro-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist raised by a village of people in community. Their work plays at the intersection of gesture, ritual, and myth within the Black diasporic imagination. Francheska reworks, repurposes, and transforms artifacts such as brown paper bags, Hispano cuaba soap, dominoes, and organic residues through sewing, folding, cutting, burning, and layering.
Francheska uses the subjective experiences of these artifacts or actions to interrogate how they create social meaning and cultural norms. These explorations point to slippages and resistance around colonial relations while expanding our capacity for pleasure, refusal, and liberation.
Alcántara holds an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2019), a BFA in Painting from Hunter College (2015), and a BA in Art History from Old Dominion University. They have been a resident artist and fellow at Queer Art (2025), LMCC’s Workspace (2024), Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2020-2023), MASS MoCA (2023), and Recess’ Session (2022). Most recently, Francheska has been awarded the prestigious Latinx Artist Fellowship by USLAF.
IG: @ francheskaalcantarastudio
TK: @ Alcantara.Taller
www.francheskaalcantara.com
Artworks
Project rendering for I Pulse, I Sway, I Play, 2027
I Pulse, I Sway, I Play is a series of sculptures that reimagine the familiar dominoes both as game and cultural artifact. The installation will feature five custom-made dominoes that are transformed into architectural expressions of live connection, motion, and queer energy. In the Caribbean and its diaspora, dominoes serve as essential social spaces—often male-oriented, where people connect, share information, and assert their presence in the community. There’s an unspoken language of strategy and predictability within the game, creating a rigid structure that mirrors broader social codes. This series of sculptures disrupt that rigidity, and ask: What happens when the game becomes unpredictable? When the pieces themselves refuse to conform? Unlike the uniform blocks of the traditional game, these pieces embody fluidity as well as moments of strength, tenderness, disruption and redefinition. They refuse a static identity, and instead exist in states of transformation, metaphorically pulsing, swaying, and playing.