Larissa Bates was born in Burlington in 1981, and grew up between Vermont and Vara Blanca, Costa Rica. She has had solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including GNYP Gallery (Berlin), Richard Heller Gallery (Los Angeles), Galeria Espacio Minimo (Madrid), NADA Art Fair (Miami), and Mogadishni (Copenhagen). Bates has been represented by Monya Rowe Gallery (New York and St. Augustine) since 2004. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum, DC Moore Gallery, and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Contemporary Art China, Public Art (Korea), El Cultural (Spain), New York Magazine, Time Out, and KUNSTforum. Collections include the West Collection, Wellington Management, and the 21c Museum Collection. She has been the recipient of the Artadia Award and was a resident artist at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Often mining a combination of colonial and neo-colonial Latin American history, as well as autobiography, the work engages with questions of authenticity, the third space, hybridity, and processes of acculturation and how one aquires culture and group belonging, and deculturation--the loss of culture and language. Masculinity and the social performance of family structures are investigated in a through the vocabularies of painting, sculpture, and video.
