Jesús Hilario-Reyes

Jesús Hilario-Reyes (born October 28, 1996 in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an anti-disciplinary artist and DJ whose practice moves across sculpture, sound, performance, expanded cinema, video, installation, digital media, metalwork, and land-based interventions. Born in Puerto Rico to parents who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, Hilario-Reyes earned a BFA in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2025. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, New York. Hilario-Reyes situates their work at the intersections of sonic performance, land installation, expanded cinema, Black diasporic culture, queer nightlife, and Caribbean ecology. Central to the practice is the concept of destierro, a Spanish term they use to evoke being “torn from the land.” Through this framework, Hilario-Reyes considers exile, migration, displacement, Black and queer fugitivity, unstable geography, and the ways bodies construct forms of belonging when home cannot be understood as fixed territory.  Caribbean shorelines and mangrove ecosystems frequently appear alongside nightclubs, dance floors, raves, Carnival, hurricanes, and sound systems. Hilario-Reyes treats these environments as related structures: both mangroves and Black queer dance spaces exist through networks of interdependence, movement, adaptation, refuge, and transformation. Their work often records the physical residue of gatherings—the marks left by dancers, scans of club floors, sound, heat, touch, or temporary architectures to reconsider the dance floor as an archive of collective experience.  Hilario-Reyes’s institutional profile expanded considerably in 2025–26. They completed their Yale MFA in 2025, presented on atmospherics at Project for Empty Space, participated in Fade at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2026, received a 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, and became Performance Space New York’s 2026–27 OPEN ROOM resident. Their year-long installation Cavernous Shoal transforms the institution’s lobby into a listening room featuring a bespoke sound system and mangrove-root sculpture, treating Black diasporic dance culture and coastal ecology as models for creating belonging through relation rather than fixed geography.