Caroline de Aquino was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1993
She earned a degree in Advertising and Publicity from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and worked in the advertising industry for six years. In 2020, during the pandemic, she shifted her focus entirely to her artistic practice. Later that year, she moved to the United States, where she continues to live and work.
Caroline works across mixed media, exploring themes of identity, migration, memory, and myth. Her practice transforms personal experience into symbolic narratives, reflecting both her Brazilian heritage and her ongoing negotiation of life in the United States.
In 2024, she participated in the Summer Contemporary Art School at the Royal College of Art. In the same year, she received the Best in Show award from the San Diego Watercolor Society, and was featured in the April issue of Vogue Magazine.
Artist Statement
A personal mythology is constructed by Caroline de Aquino to narrate the journey of the Latin American immigrant in California. Through this mythology, her story is woven into the collective experience of her community, and lived realities are transformed into symbolic narratives. Recurring characters—often inspired by nature, such as jaguars, birds, and wings—are used to capture the complexities, nuances, and contradictions of migration. These figures are made to serve as metaphors for resilience, longing, and the fractured promise of the American Dream. Each painting is designed to function as both an independent chapter and part of a larger cosmology, documenting shared history like a visual diary.
Influences from Latin American folklore, Brazilian nature, and global mythologies are drawn upon in her practice, reflecting the hybrid constitution of Brazilian identity itself. Myth is employed as a tool of resistance—dignity is asserted in the face of a system that frequently dehumanizes immigrants through invisibility, disposability, and exploitative labor
Mixed media is employed in her work. This layered approach is intended to mirror the immigrant condition: a patchwork of identities, cultures, and languages that coexist and overlap. Just as Latin Americans are often grouped into a singular category despite profound cultural differences, her materials are interlocked like fragments of a quilt—tension is held while multiplicity is revealed. Each canvas is built through an accumulative process, like slow stitching, where every detail is contributed to the larger narrative.
Her aim is not to illustrate but to evoke. By abstracting migration into symbolic forms, viewers are invited to engage with their own interpretations, extending the story beyond her hand. In this space, myth is used to affirm identity, culture, and humanity, and individual struggle is transformed into collective power.