Marlo Marrero

For a more recent CV or bio please visit the artist's website, www.marlomarrero.com/
 

I was born in 1969 to an mixed couple, my mom with white European and French Canadian roots from northern Maine and my dad, Puerto Rican, born in Puerto Rico. 

 

I am currently a homeschooling mama to my boys who are 13 and 15. My husband was born and raised in Dominican Republic. We spend as much time as we can living in Dominican Republic. We are raising bilingual and bicultural children. After I did a ton of photography in Dominican I came to a philosophical pause about my photography and its purpose. I have a huge body of work that I planned for a book- Documentary work from the mountains of DR. Today, I mostly photograph with my phone and sometimes with my digital camera. I am returning to my roots of mixed media. I find myself compartmentalized. And I am in an area of my life where art making is on the periphery. My children are receiving all my creative energy at the moment. I quit my full time teaching career of 14 years at Miss Porter’s School, Farmington, CT, an all girls boarding school, to focus solely on homeschooling. 

 

During my time at Miss Porter’s School, I was in charge of the photography program, I was the program. I taught intro, intermediate, advanced, color, digital and independent classes. I also taught the first level of the studio art program. During my time there I helped develop award winning high school photographers and dynamic creative thinkers. I completed large scale community art projects with Miss Porter’s students and students in the community. An example is Act Like You Care that was completed in 2001 with 12-14 girls who learned about their surrounding communities, activism and gained heroes in the process. They photographed their heroes and those images, through funding by a company called Gerber Scientific, were printed on a wrap. That wrap was adhered to a CT Transit bus and travelled Hartford county for a year. 

 

I have won a grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and Art Matters. I did a residency in 2006 with The Photographic Resource Center, with baby in tow. That was a first for them and me. I have been to multiple Society of Photographic education conferences as well as POCC “People of Color Conference” for Independent and boarding schools.

 

I received my Master’s degree ‘97 in Photography at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford where I studied with Mary Frey and Ellen Carey in photography, and Chris Horton and Gene Gort in experimental and video. During that time I found myself involved in a censorship case concerning my some of my thesis work. I had received permission to hang my work in a city owned building. I won the right to keep my work installed after it had been censored by city officials.

 

I received my Bachelor’s degree ‘92 in Photography at University of Connecticut where I studied with John Craig and William “Bill” Parker among others.

My blog https://withlovemarlo.blog/

My instagram @marlomarrerophotography
 

Married name Marlo Marrero Fernandez

circa 2021

Born1969
BirthplaceMaine
GenderFemale
CitizenshipUnited States
Cultural HeritageFrench Canadian, European, Puerto Rican
Light Work RelationshipDonation, 2014 (by The Society for Photographic Education)
Websitehttp://www.marlomarrero.com/
https://withlovemarlo.blog/

Artwork

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Essays


Feminist ideas are always on my mind. In my work the vagina is a point of departure. I have selectively photographed the mid region: hips, thighs, vagina and buttocks. The power that I see in the women that I have photographed is stunning and provocative. I want to challenge the viewer with ideas about power and clothing styles. My work during the last 10 years has been rooted in the Dominican Republic. I am thrilled to finally realize this idea into photographs. I have been observing for a long time. 12 These images are beautiful in that the work celebrates the body, full curves, irregular or symmetrically perfect. They reveal details of lips and labia even though these women are fully dressed. In these photographs there is a certain sense of confidence that I want to be seen: a self assured manner and presentation of and by the subject, primarily a Latina woman. They reveal power that I see in women, specifically Latinas. When I consider positive body image,

I believe the Dominican female has a better grasp of her body and all that it is worth. While body image is constructed by culture, I do not see the same body issues in DR as in the United States. I am fortunate to work at a female, single sex institution in the United States where our students bypass some of the stresses about appearance and/ or our students are able to work through their issues in a safe environment. Either way the issues exist. When I am in the Dominican, specifically in the mountains, I hear men and women speak openly and securely about the body, female or male. These images are painful in that they reveal contradictions about assumptions and stereotypes of women and our manner of dress. There is crude conversation around the tight pant-wearing woman from the outside, the onlookers, and by both genders. Camel toe is a slang term that refers to the outline of a human female’s labia majora as seen through tightly fitting clothes.

My first experience with this word was associated with disdain and disgust, primarily because that was how everyone else responded to a woman wearing clothes “too” tight. I am a child of the eighties, when the fashion was to wear jeans tight. I fought with my mother to wear jeans as Brooke Shields wore her Calvin’s “there is nothing between me and my Calvin’s”. My mother did not give in. I was never a baggy dresser, hiding underneath my clothes, but I never felt like I dressed like my Aunt (Latina), of whom my mother (Caucasian) always thought dressed in poor taste. Her clothes were too revealing, too tight, too everything. But really? My Aunt is beautiful and so is my mother. So I would like to ask my mother, and many people for that matter, why are we so judgmental? Please understand I am not excluding Dominicans from this process of judgment. They just arrive at the conversation with a different set of mental tools, self-awareness and pride. With the advent of TV shows in the United States, “What Not to Wear” or the phrase “wardrobe malfunction”, who is to say what is the norm? It is arguable that the manner of dress in the Dominican Republic is made under false pretense, for the man and the machismo culture. But I have been in the thick of it. There is not much thought about the why, other then it has to be. It is a way of being beautiful, even powerful.