Dahlia (Colón; matronymic maiden name) Bloomstone (b. 1995) is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Bloomstone has presented with CultureHub (NY), Hauser & Wirth (NY), Blade Study (NY), Galerie Timonier (NY), Beverly’s (NY), Theater Mitu (NY), The Tomorrow Archive (NY), LMCC (NY), InterAccess (CAD), Essex Flowers (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Rhizome (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), and Hyacinth Gallery (NY), among others, and has forthcoming presentations with Westbeth Gallery (NY) for the Independent Study Program exhibition, Electronic Arts Intermix (NY), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in June 2025. She has been invited to speak at institutions including Bard College (NY), Queens College (NY), the University of Texas–Austin (TX), Rochester Institute of Technology (NY), Recess Art (NY), and the New York Arts Program (NY). Dahlia’s work is also affiliated with the White Columns Gallery (NY) artist registry. She is the recipient of the SPCUNY Actionist grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Master’s Thesis grant from Hunter College, the Ox-Bow CIP scholarship, and a New York Community Trust Van Lier grant. She has participated in programs including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Theater Mitu, School of Visual Arts, and Ox-Bow, and received a full fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. She is also a co-founder of New Uncanny Gallery in West Harlem, NY. From 2020 to 2022, she served as a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College; in 2023, she was a Visiting Artist/Professor at UT Austin, and also teaches 3D animation and games at Ramapo College in New Jersey. She will serve as the Teaching Artist in Residence at the State University of New York–Oswego in Fall 2025. Dahlia is currently a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP). She lives and works in New York.
Dahlia has developed a body of work rooted in video, which has evolved to encompass animation, video games, sculpture, code, dance, film, sound, and performance. However, her focus for the past two years has been on video games. Dahlia addresses and reconciles representations of domesticity, joy, respectability politics, social value, and mutual aid, often through the lens of specific modes of affective labor. With humor, vulnerability, and political urgency, she surveys the technologies and ecologies around the social value and social implications of sexual commerce and investigates the paradigm shifts in these economies. In her practice, Dahlia is especially interested in conjugating the surrealities of SW, dumbness and cuteness, the nonstop vigilance that comes with participating in US healthcare, the fraught space between digital gaming culture and online sexual commodification, damask patterns, the corporeal responses elicited by the digital visuality in video games, gold, the language that emerges from online censorship, examining the spectralization of digital ecosystems through unintended game mechanics, using fishes as main characters, metaphors, and as vehicles and activators to embed conversations of intertwined ecologies, and speaking to alternative systems of value and care. She is a relational fable-teller in dialogue with concurring socio-political and economic issues, constantly renegotiating her relationship to these concepts within the moralizing discourse in certain domains.
