Biankah (Bee) Cortez, 24, They/He/She

(b. 1998 Houston, TX, based in Austin, TX)

Bee Cortez received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin with a major in Studio Art and a minor in Art History. After graduating, they decided to continue their practice in Austin to further explore their own interests in painting, media, and printmaking. Cortez’s work features a lot of self-exploration and discipline, along with emotional and mental expression.

In 2020, Bee was part of the inaugural class of Aesthetics of Health at the University of Texas at Austin, where they merged art with health by interviewing cancer patients and their caretakers, redesigning clinical spaces, and understanding where their practice and art overall can create a better public health space. Their work was featured in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics.

I work in a wide variety of different media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, digital media, and more. Across these different disciplines my work usually comes from the same place or with similar interests/ideas in mind. I make art as a way to explore different ideas and interests and simply to express myself and convey my emotions and experiences to the viewers. My goal is to evoke an emotion in the viewer to help them understand a specific concept.

My experiences, identity, and life have had the greatest influence on my work, as it is what I know the best. I have had difficulty expressing myself and articulating my emotions and thoughts from a young age, and found art to be an easy way to work through this. As I got older, certain things like depression and identity became more prevalent issues in my life, and as a result became important elements in my art practice.