Bio

lance minto-strouse (b. 2000) in Miami, Florida and lives and works in Miami, Florida and Brooklyn, New York. Of Afro-Chinese, Anglo, and Native American ancestry, Minto-Strouse received a BFA from New World School of the Arts (2026). His practice centers on installation, sculpture, and drawing, working with discarded and overlooked materials to explore community, ritual, and memory. Selected solo exhibitions include “Still Change” (2025, Yale Norfolk, Norfolk, Connecticut). Selected group exhibitions include “Echos of Life, Fragments of Reality” (2025, Edge Zone, Miami, Florida) and “Culturehaus” (2024, SOHO House, Miami, Florida). Minto-Strouse received the Yale Norfolk School of Art Fellowship (2025), the Artist Engagement Fund from the National Performance Network (2025), and the Catalyst Award from Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (2025).

Artist Statement 

I see history as a web of connections; routes that tie people, objects, and places together. The Cuban coffee we sip holds the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The denim jeans we wear carry the story of the working class. In my installations, paintings, and photography; I breathe life into these connections. Layering material, gesture, and rhythm to show how the past lives in the present.

My work begins with what’s familiar and often forgotten: cardboard, bricks, ladders not to disguise them, but to let them speak. I’m interested in material honesty: how an object, left as it is, can hold space, weight, and memory. These are “specific objects” in the truest sense, things that exist in real space without pretending to be anything else, yet carry the imprint of labor, history, and survival. I collect these from construction sites, sidewalks, and spaces in transition. I want their histories to surface. 

I layer these materials with rhythm and reference: text, gesture, repeated forms, treating them as both structure and story. Like pages torn from overlapping narratives, they carry personal and collective meaning, often drawn from music, literature, and the everyday language of working-class life. My work builds systems of attention; arrangements that invite the viewer to pause, to notice, to listen.

I see myself as an active viewer of the world around me. I pay attention to the forgotten. Even if we ignore them, their presence shapes how we move and live. These subtle forms carry meaning, whether we notice them or not.

Photo by Sabrina Fazai