Ana Flores   (Cuban) 

Ana Flores is a sculptor, environmentalist and community arts advocate who lives in southern Rhode Island and Nova Scotia, Canada. Her first landscape was her native Cuba and her work shows a rich sense of form, color and fascination with water that was imprinted during her childhood in the tropics.

Her work is shown internationally and is in private, corporate and institutional collections throughout the United States. Flores has also been very active doing public art projects engaging diverse communities since 1986. She has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, her most recent awards include a millennium grant from Rhode Island 2000 to build a public sculpture for the town of Westerly, the Visual Arts Sea Grant to create a series of sculptures based on her life by the sea in Cuba, New England and Nova Scotia and in 1998 she was selected as the Rhode Island Artist to be exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Flores’ sculptural work and public collaborative projects explore the meaning of a "sense of place"; how the landscapes we live in can shape our psyche and lives. Her sculptures often begin with a natural artifact found in the places she lives, working in a combination of materials including clay, wood, cement and metal she then finds the story suggested by that element in nature. Flores prepares for the sculptural creative process with works on papers that are in themselves a complete painted statement.

Ana Flores is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and an adjunct faculty there. Her teaching is based on multi-disciplinary concerns regarding our relationship with the environment and the healing powers of nature and creativity. To that end she has organized "the Gaia Dialogues" a community of artists and scientists in Rhode Island who collaborate on projects. She has lived and worked in New Zealand and returned to Cuba - in both islands she has had experiences with herbal healers that have been very influential to her work.