Ijania Cortez, born 1990, is an American multidisciplinary artist living and working in Detroit, Michigan, USA. A Detroit native, Cortez is a self-taught artist, taking an interest in drawing at an early age. Due to lack of knowledge of art as a career, the artist didn’t begin her professional practice until 2027 at the age of 27. She hosted her first show in Detroit, A Summer Nativity, at the Camillo Pardo Studio in Detroit Michigan. This show would be the jumping pad that introduced her to the art community in Detroit. She began to apprentice for notable artists in the city, and subsequently began her mural practice. Cortez is an accomplished muralist, with murals in various cites in Michigan, including Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor, the latter being at the University of Michigan Institute of Humanities. While crafting her mural practice she also held her own in the fine arts world, and in 2020 gained representation from Collected Detroit. In 2024, she held her first represented solo exhibition Bioluminescence, also sponsored by the Detroit Metropolitan Museum of Design. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit Artist Market, The University of Michigan, and her murals have been included in various campaigns including Rockstar Energy, and BET and Milestone Comics. ARTIST STATEMENT:I am a self taught artist that uses neon pigments to explore themes of culture, identity, hubris and vulnerability. I was born in 1990, which makes me a child of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. This time frame heavily influences the visual language of my work; I was not privy to art by way of fine museums. Instead, my influences were all around me in the culture I consumed daily in the city of Detroit; fashion, hair, music, wrapped in the harsh realities of a neglected and forgotten city and its people. My work pays homage to this by way of observation in the form of portraiture. My portraits primarily consist of young black men. I meet them, interview them, and aim to create works that tell a story about their spirit as well as celebrate them just as they are. My paintings are love letters to the black man, giving them a window to be seen as a marriage of both strength and softness. The neon I use is charged with layers of meaning. First, it is a completely synthetic pigment. For me this represents the unnatural environment that is the inner city: a man made place that does not have resources to thrive by design. Neon also represents visibility, and at times caution. For me it is important that my subjects draw the eye in a visceral way. Neon stretches beyond the natural spectrum for humans, shining brighter than white. This allows me to do what I like to call “spectrum stretching”. I’m able to add complexity to the color this way. Because of this, all of my paintings are florescent and work in both natural light and UV light. In the broader view of my work, I take an anthropological approach. I consider the essences of who black people are to America, how we are seen, and how our stories are preserves. My solo 2024 exhibition, Bioluminescence, was a step into the presentation of such things. The definition of the former is the process by which living things emit light. I think about the bottom of the ocean: dark, cold and full of pressure. I think about the place where I grew up: also at times dark, cold and full of pressure. These environments would seem as though nothing could survive. And yet in the ocean organisms are glowing. And here in America, blackness glows. Inexplicitly, it glows. It emits joy, radiance, culture and is the gas America has always survived on yet disserviced. My paintings are a response to this, my definition of black Americana.