Devin Osorio, Aprender Del Caer, 2021; Limited Edition Print

Devin Osorio combines painting and textiles to create magical realist compositions of Washington Heights, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan celebrated for its large Dominican-American population. The artist—inspired by folklore, artisanal crafts, storytelling, and ethnographic studies of the Caribbeans and Latin America—instills personal memories into fables and narratives that are both dissected and imagined. Motivated by a desire to document the Dominican diasporic experience, his works are intended to become future artifacts that can convey the story of his community.  Featuring a figure suspended from a branch of a tropical fruit tree, Aprender Del Caer was inspired by a conversation that Osorio once had with a South African shaman, who told them, “I’ve always felt bad for kids that grow up in big cities because there are no trees. When you grow up around trees, you learn to climb them and, more importantly, how to fall off of them. You learn that the scariest part of falling off t