Lisette More / Photo: Dora Nano
Lisette Morel is a New Jersey based Dominican-American artist, mother and educator, born in New York City. She initiated her career as a painter, and her practice has broadened to include installation/site-specific works, assemblage and performance. She embraces these as organic extensions of her body, which help her navigate, question, blur and challenge set boundaries within systems. Most recently, Lisette has been known to perform with her daughters, friends and neighbors in recurring endurance collaborations. Some of these include Run to Your Friend Until You Can’t Anymore, with performance artist Ayana Evans. In this action for Korean Art Forum they run to one another for 2-3 hours, celebrating and exploiting the strength and vulnerability of their friendship. Lisette has also created her own performances, where she utilizes found objects to mark given spaces. One of these performances includes Raw Forms Forum, curated by artist Dominique Duroseau, Newark Museum, NJ. In the Winter of 2021, she performed And You Do What They Tell Ya; And You Eat What They Tell Ya, inspired by the infamous band Rage Against The Machine. In the Winter of 2020 Morel invited neighbors to draw in the snow-covered street with mops and brooms. Her large-scale installations have been included in exhibitions with the Neo-Latino Collective group exhibit Critical Mass, Monmouth Museum, NJ. She has exhibited as well as part of the I Kan Do Dat exhibit, curated by Daniel Simmons and Oshune Layne, Skylight Gallery Brooklyn, NY. Her first solo exhibition Places You Aren’t Supposed To Go: (Don’t Play Me) Do We Still Call It Abstract Art? premiered at Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ. Awards and residencies include the First Sustainable Arts Fellow Residency, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, 2016; and an artist residency at Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, NY, 2012. She participated in Aljira’s Emerge10 Program and at El Museo del Barrio Fifth Biennial: The (S) Files. Lisette is a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. She received her Master in Fine Arts at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her Bachelor of Arts at Rutgers University.