About

KEVELIS MATTHEWS-ALVARADO is a queer nonbinary afro-latine multimedia artist, interdisciplinary thinker, and poet currently based on occupied Lenape Land (Philadelphia, PA).

Kevelis’s mixed media creative practices are inextricably invested in collective liberation and located along a continuum of other radical black queer artists who use their work as catalysts for imagining freedom and healing generational wounds. Kevelis draws inspiration from current and historical political and artistic movements by exploring the ways artists have participated in these organized resistance efforts across time and space.

Often their artistic process is a direct response to harsh realities; a cathartic release and an emotional exhale operating within Audre Lorde’s framework that

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​“this poetry is not a luxury but is a vital necessity of our existence. [poetry] forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

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Currently, Kevelis is cultivating a growing body of work grounded in Afrofuturism which seeks to recenter and rememorialize portraits of past ancestors and land stewards in newly imagined spaces of liberation and abundance.