"Demosthene’s artwork examines how black culture is commodified and fetishized. Whether through paintings or drawings, she seeks to magnify the subtlety of racial constructs and how viewers have become comfortable with derogatory images. Her most recent work, ‘The Capture’, delves into the subconscious mind of a black heroine and the ephemeral quality of her thoughts and experiences. As she uncovers her special abilities, through a succession of serendipitous events, she comes to understand how these moments of self-realization can be very temporal. With this new series, Demosthene has been intrigued by the black female body as an icon in contemporary imagery and how her physical size is supposed to dictate a certain set of ideals and behavior. ‘The Capture’ is the initial phase in constructing a non-typical black female heroine persona."

Florine Demosthene earned her BFA the Parsons New School for Design and her MFA from Hunter College. She has shown her work extensively in group and solo exhibitions in the USA, Caribbean, UK, Slovakia, Germany and Africa. She was a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2011 and was featured in the premiere issue of Arc (a magazine that is dedicated to highlighting emerging and established Caribbean artists). She’s a 2012 Keyholder resident at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York, a Guest Artist for the 2014 Dakar Biennale, and a participant in the first Kampala Art Biennale in Uganda. More of her work can be found at florinedemosthene.com.