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Destyni “Desi” Swoope Brings Afro-Caribbean Memory, Matter & Matriarchy to the National Museum of Puerto Rican Art & Culture & The Ringling Museum of Art
co-written by Murph Phi and Zeke Hugo
Sarasota, FL — Tomorrow, October 21, 2025, as part of its public programming series, The Ringling will host Destyni Swoope for a featured gallery talk inside Nuestro Vaivén (Our Sway). The programming places the her in direct dialogue with museum visitors, transitioning her role from exhibiting artist to an active voice within the institution’s discourse platform. On October 4, 2025, The Ringling opened Nuestro Vaivén (Our Sway), a dynamic contemporary Latin art survey where Destyni “Desi” Swoope presented her newest work marking her second major museum exhibition of 2025.
Roots to Reverberations
Swoope’s creative practice is anchored in rhythm, ritual, and the textures that make up her Afro-Caribbean heritage. In her current series Abuela’s House, installed now at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (NMPRAC) in Chicago, Destyni constructed narrative “rooms” of memory, heritage, and domestic myth through mixed media compositions of paint, reclaimed fabrics, found objects, and hand stitching. In turn, Swoope is able to weave the presence of her great-grandmother into visual liminal spaces blurring thresholds between private reverie and collective ancestral archive.
With works such as “Heirloom” (2023), “Boriken” (2023), and “Papi & Abuela’s Anniversary” (2024), she conjures scenes of family rituals, multi-generational companionship, and uses their dwelling as sites of poetic power. Whether in a cluster of stacked tropical houses, a table set for cafecito, or the halos of color within the composition of her works, Swoope’s visual lexicon constantly reflects on devotion, restoration, and reclamation.
While her relationship with her abuela has been the base of most of her artistic dialogue, that motherline is not romanticized; rather, Swoope treats it as incontrovertible groundwork, both material and poetic, as a lens to interrogate identity, family, and the demands of belonging.
A Survey Stage: Nuestro Vaivén
With Nuestro Vaivén (Our Sway), The Ringling offers a capacious context in which Swoope’s voice can interact with Latinx peers across geometry, abstraction, video, installation, collage, ceramics, and more. The exhibition highlights 22 artists from 11 different Latin American countries and 11 Florida counties, pairing local community leaders in Sarasota with visual makers in a dialogue that activates both civic and aesthetic space. Swoope is among the 14 artists whose work appears in the “exhibition-within-the-exhibition” segment featuring 14 works from 14 artists through three additional gallery spaces.Unlike a conventional survey, Nuestro Vaivén is embedded in process: local leaders in various markets collaborated in conversations with their paired artists informed site-responsive works and communal activations at The Ringling. By positioning Swoope within this constellation, the museum situates her work not just as intimate confession or archive, but as a much needed discourse between history and the future. Her deeply textured and layered mix media works register as both anchor and ripple in this larger civic conversation.
Why This Moment Matters
It is no small feat for an artist at this stage in her trajectory to land two museum exhibitions in a single year especially within institutions of such prestige. Abuela’s House at NMPRAC is a deeply personal, museum-scale meditation on cultural memory, and Nuestro Vaivén now folds her into a regional dialogue of artists with similar experience and community engagement.For some of Swoope’s family, the museum space is a recent encounter entered first through her work but through themselves. The artist immortalizes her lineage through imagery — seeing her work enfolded into institutional spaces is a sovereign reclamation for the people she loves the most. She remarks:
“Well… it’s a priority for me to advocate & include the people that have given me so much into what I do (family or community). Our stories & lives eventually become blueprints for the generations after us. Despite whether they’ve felt represented in a place or pushed away – if I’m going to take up any space, I carry them with me. A big step for one of us, is multiple steps for so many others.”
Eidolon producer Isaiah Anderson was able to hear more of the thoughts and intentions woven into her work through an interview for the Eidolon Pipeline Cohort. He notes her remarks on her focus on world-building, “I think about it all the time, I’m constantly in a state of review and adjustment to better illustrate the world I’m creating through my work.” Her process of refinement comes with careful thought of each aspect stating, “I want to make sure that I have consistency in the imagery in my world.” This point was specifically poignant with her making light of how she’s encountered people who’ve shared moments of joy and grief with her. Destyni recounted in conversation how onlookers view these vignettes of familiar moments in her culture; they illicit emotions and sensory stimuli from environments that they remember fondly or simply cannot access anymore.
In a visual culture that often erases or commodifies Black and Afro-Caribbean presence, Destyni’s insistence on recording memory as matter on textiles is at once a rescue from popular narrative and an affirmation of excellence in matrilineal form.
The Ringling visitors will witness the public’s newest encounter with her work alongside artists whose practices range from the spare to the exuberant. Her pieces are not solitary in voice; they will be woven into a network of Latinx voices, histories, and futures. Destyni’s name now appearing on The Ringling’s roster of contemporary artists is more than validation. It is a statement: that embodied heritage, stitched by hand, carries weight in the corridors of legacy museums too.
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“Abuela’s House”
September 6, 2005 - July 18, 2026
National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (NMPRAC)
3015 W Division Street,
Chicago, Il
www.nmprac.org
“Nuestro Vaivén: Our Sway”
Oct 4, 2025 - March 22, 2026
The Ringling
5401 Bay Shore Drive,
Sarasota, FL
www.theringling.org