Dominican American Artist & Illustrator

ABOUT ME

Myrka Castillo is a first-generation Dominican-American artist and illustrator based in New Jersey. A 2017 graduate of the School of Visual Arts, her practice spans acrylic painting, watercolor, and digital illustration — work rooted in cultural celebration, portraiture, and the lived experience of diaspora.

Drawn to artists like John William Waterhouse and Alice Neel, Myrka filters the mysticism and feminine archetypes of Romanticism through the perspective of a modern Afro-Latina woman. Her work pushes back against flattened representations of Latinx identity, offering something more layered, more tender, and more true.

Her current focus is a Major Arcana Tarot series reimagining each card through the symbols, spirituality, and cultural memory of the Hispanic community — part tribute, part reclamation. Rooted in her own connection to Dominican heritage and the 21 Divisiones tradition, the series draws on the sacred as a visual language for honoring what often goes unrepresented.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I make work about the women I come from and the traditions that shaped me — the ones passed down quietly, through ritual, through image, through story.

As a first-generation Dominican-American, I grew up between two worlds, and my art lives in that in-between. I work in acrylic, oil, watercolor, and digital illustration, returning again and again to portraiture as a way of making space — for Afro-Latina faces, for diasporic experience, for a femininity that is soft and spiritual and complex all at once.

My influences range from the Pre-Raphaelites to Alice Neel: artists who understood that how a woman is painted is never just aesthetic — it’s an argument. I’m interested in making that argument differently. Where Western art has often flattened or exoticized the Latina figure, I want to slow down, to render with care, to let my subjects hold their full weight.

My ongoing Tarot series is the most direct expression of this. Reinterpreting the Major Arcana through Hispanic cultural symbols and spiritual traditions — including the 21 Divisiones of my own Dominican heritage — the project treats our cosmology as worthy of the same reverence that Western art has always extended to its own. Each card is an act of documentation and devotion.

I believe representation is a form of love. My work is made in that spirit.