Tiffany Alfonseca

Tiffany Alfonseca: Afro-Latin Portraiture, Memory and Belonging

Tiffany Alfonseca is a Dominican-American contemporary artist whose figurative paintings and works on paper explore Black and Afro-Latin diasporic identity through portraiture, colour, surface and intimate narrative. Born in 1994, she creates images rooted in memory, family, womanhood and lived experience, often placing Black and Brown figures within spaces where tenderness, self-possession and cultural inheritance are made visible.

Her work belongs to a wider conversation around representation, visibility and identity in contemporary figuration. While her practice is deeply connected to Caribbean and Afro-diasporic experience, it also resonates with broader discussions within contemporary African art, where portraiture becomes a means of rethinking presence, beauty, history and social imagination across the Black Atlantic.

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Portraits of Womanhood, Kinship and Afro-Diasporic Life

Alfonseca’s paintings are often centred on women and girls whose presence is quiet, direct and emotionally charged. Rather than presenting identity as a fixed category, she approaches it as something formed through gesture, posture, adornment, memory and relation. Her figures appear within environments shaped by domestic interiors, floral patterns, Caribbean references and personal symbolism, creating scenes where private life becomes a site of cultural affirmation.

These works frequently hold together strength and vulnerability. A face turned inward, a body held in stillness, or a shared glance between figures can suggest interior worlds that are not immediately available to the viewer. In this way, Alfonseca’s portraits resist simplification. They do not simply depict Black and Brown subjects; they give them psychological space, beauty, opacity and agency.

Colour, Surface and the Construction of Belonging

Colour plays a central role in Tiffany Alfonseca’s practice. Saturated pinks, greens, blues and yellows often surround her figures, while glitter, gouache, acrylic, coloured pencil and textured surfaces create a material language that is both decorative and emotionally precise. Pattern is never merely ornamental. It becomes a way of building atmosphere, memory and cultural continuity.

Her compositions often merge figure and setting, allowing the body to exist within a larger visual field of plants, textiles, architecture and symbolic detail. This fusion of portrait and environment gives the work its distinctive sense of intimacy. Alfonseca constructs spaces of belonging in which identity is not isolated from place, but shaped by it.

A Contemporary Voice in Black and Afro-Latin Figuration

Alfonseca earned her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2020 and was Artist in Residence at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles in 2021. Since then, her work has gained visibility through exhibitions, museum presentations and art fairs in the United States, Europe and Africa.

What distinguishes her practice is the way it combines visual immediacy with cultural specificity. Her paintings are accessible in their beauty, yet they remain attentive to complex questions of race, femininity, heritage and representation. Through images that are vibrant, intimate and carefully composed, Alfonseca contributes to a new generation of figurative painters expanding how Afro-diasporic experience is seen and understood.

Selected Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects

Recent presentations include Inner Gardens, a two-person exhibition at OOA Gallery. Alfonseca’s solo exhibitions include Tiffany Alfonseca: De las manos que nos crearon at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles in 2021 and Spotlight Tiffany Alfonseca at De Buck Gallery in New York in 2024. Her work was included in WHEN WE SEE US: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa.

Her work has also been presented with OOA Gallery, Library Street Collective, De Buck Gallery, Gallery 1957, Unit London, UTA Artist Space, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New Image Art Gallery and The Latinx Project at NYU, as well as at major fairs including The Armory Show and Expo Chicago.

Alongside her studio practice, Alfonseca has developed curatorial projects including De Lo Mio at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York and Pa’l Patio at Calderon Gallery. These projects reflect her commitment to creating space for underrepresented voices and reinforce the social and cultural concerns that inform her own painting.

Available Works

Explore a selection of available works by Tiffany Alfonseca at OOA Gallery, including figurative paintings and works on paper exploring Afro-Latin identity, portraiture, memory, womanhood and contemporary diasporic experience.