Chicanx Latinx Art and Artists: Alexander, Nyah (Wiki Draft: Ana María Arévalo Gosen)

Ana María Arévalo Gosen (born in 1988) is a Venezuelan visual storyteller, singer, and artist who is interested in exploring women’s rights, social justice, the prison system, and migration through photography. She is best known for her awarded project, Dias Eternos (2018), in which she photographed Venezeulan women in pre-trial detention centers to document their daily routines and the realities of prisons in Venezuela. Ana María Arevalo Gosen believes in causing long lasting social impact through her storytelling, and continues to travel to her home country of Venezuela to do so.

Early Life and Education

Gosen was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1988. At the age of twenty one, she moved to Toulouse France where she studied political science at Institut d’Etudes Politiques, and later photography at ETPA Ecole de photographie. Following the completion of her studies, she moved to Hamburg, Germany in 2014 where she began to practice the art of visual storytelling while working for a magazine and doing freelance photography work. She has received a number of awards and recognition for her work since the beginning of her career.

Notable Art and Career

Ana María Arevalo Gosen is widely known for her 2016-2017 project, The Meaning of Life, which intimately tells the story of her husband’s battle with testicular cancer. The photo series tells the story of Gosen’s husband’s fight with cancer from the moment that he starts chemotherapy. The Meaning of Life gained a great deal of attention from podcasts and publications about the exhibition to being featured in photography festivals. This notoriety led to the exhibition being used annually since its creation to partner with different organizations to bring awareness to and fund research about testicular cancer.

In 2018, Ana María Arevalo Gosen took on what would become one of her most famous and awarded projects to date, Días Eternos. In this project, Arevalo Gosen travels back to her home country of Venezuela to examine and expose the Criminal Justice System and the heartbreaking realities of the women awaiting trial in these prisons and detention centers. The project documents the dangers for women in the specific prison she visited as they are not separated from convicted criminals nor men, the pregnant women receive no level of prenatal care or medical attention, and lack of food and water.

Women Water Defenders detailed the water shortages in El Salvador and the group of middle-aged women from Santo Tomás that have joined together to bring awareness to the issue and demand that the government provide them with clean water when there are shortages. Her photos document women bathing themselves and their children with bowls and buckets of water, the women of the group meeting and organizing, but also of what their homes and daily lives look like. This project was completed in tandem with National Geographic.