A few months ago, cover artist Grechel Rosado of Providence felt like she was burning out. Creating a piece of art every month, while juggling a full-time job, was becoming hard to sustain. Then, she came across The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. “The book shows how to build a relationship with creativity,” Rosado explains, “And, just as importantly, how to sustain that relationship.” The book suggests various tools; one that works for her is keeping a journal. “I take all my thoughts and dump them out into my journal, and think about them, as well as my artistic projects. It re-energizes me.” She hasn’t faced burnout since, she reveals, leaning back in her chair at White Electric – one of her favorite coffee shops.
Rosado was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Her family moved to Massachusetts when she was a year old. While a sophomore in high school, she accompanied her older brother to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “I remember how high-powered that space felt. And I wanted to recreate that feeling. I started taking art classes, and have never stopped,” she says. Rosado attended UMass Dartmouth. “The allure for me was being able to hang out with artists, along with students from other majors and disciplines outside of the arts. It was not a total immersion, so there were a lot of other things that I learned and experienced which helped me as an artist,” she says.
She graduated Class of 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and a Printmaking minor. During the COVID pandemic, Rosado drove down to Florida and lived with her parents for a time, using their patio as a studio space to start her printmaking business. In early 2021, she set up shop in Pawtucket, before moving to Providence two years later. For the cover, Rosado did a relief print that she calls “ a reimagining” of one of her previous prints, We Protect Each Other.
“The illustration is about femininity and empowerment: how we uplift each other in these weird and uncertain times,” she says. Resistance to traditional and societal expectations permeates her work, and her self-portraits can be described as confrontational. Her eyes are commonly looking straight ahead, piercing the viewer with their gaze. Other themes she works with are identity, belonging, and cultural / ancestral roots. Her favorite work is Cocina Española, in which her mother is cooking at the stove, hair in a bun, looking down at the food she’s stirring in a pot with various ingredients to her left on a countertop. “My mother didn’t know she had posed for me,” Rosado says with a smile. “My stepdad had sent me pictures of her cooking. I drew from them. The work is a storybook, as she’s in the center of what feels like a portal.” She emphasizes, “That’s the mission of my work: to tell a story.”
Rosado teaches printmaking, advanced printmaking, and life and figure drawing in her welcoming and inclusive classroom at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, MA. For two years, she served as a program coordinator with WaterFire in Providence, running an art camp for first through-fifth-graders, a paid internship, a mentorship program for BIPOC high school students called ArtLab@ WaterFire, and Waterfire Accelerate, a year-long professional development program for artists under 30. She’s a member of Binch Press/Queer. Archive.Work, a cooperative print and design studio in Providence. Its focus on fine arts, printmaking and book-binding make for, as Rosado says, “cross contamination in the best way possible,” when it comes to ideas and artistic styles. Rosado views teaching and mentoring as a “passing of the torch,” but equally as a way of continuing to sustain her own artistic growth and evolution. She also cites making connections with other artists as a benefit.
“It’s a way to appreciate my unique story, and how powerful that story can be,” she says of her artwork. “In uplifting Puerto Rican culture without turning it into a gimmick, I can tell the story of me, of a Puerto Rican woman’s experience.”
Rosado’s artwork can be viewed at her website, yosoygrechel.com.
