photo courtesy of

johann c. muñoz-tapasco | taken in Apartadó, COL

les gomez-gonzalez (b. 1998, New York, NY) is an Afro-Caribbean, queer visual artist, organizer, and educator based in Miami, FL.

les finds forms of healing through articulating the spiritual and regenerative processes of clay centering Afro-Indigenous care and earth-tending practices in the Americas and the Caribbean. Through a researched-based, interdisciplinary practice, les investigates clay materials as sites for the reclamation of bodily autonomy. They engage in repeated gestures, tasks, and forms to explore care routines to support menstruation, mental health, chronic pain, and illness. In this way, clay is (re)inscribed as an agent of care,remedy, spiritual portal, and life-bearer, expressed through labors of care–such as the creation of vessels to hold sustenance, offerings, and histories.

Clay’s regenerative and collective nature fosters the exploration of the fragility, resilience, and memory of the body– a process that is further translated through photography, video, sculpture, and drawing. les embraces the tensions, gaps, and stagnancies alongside the gifts of leisure, forgives, and time. Ultimately, manifesting as a collection of clay residue, photos, videos, and paper, re-contextualizing, repurposing, and archiving the entire lives of these materials, which endlessly contain everything and everyone these materials have held.

les earned a BFA in Studio Art and a minor in Art History from Florida International University (2020). They have since participated in several artist residencies, including Starworks' Material-Research Residency in Star,NC (2025), Finca Morada’s Artist-in-Residence program in North Miami, FL (2022), and the Chautauqua Visual Arts Residency in Chautauqua, NY. In 2024, they received the Zenobia Award for Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts’ Summer Residency program.

les is a co-founder of Comedor Azul (est. 2021), a collective Latin American and Caribbean food-research project based in Miami, FL. Since 2022, les has taught wheel-throwing and hand-building at various ceramics studios throughout South Florida and Upstate NY. Through their ceramic workshops, they facilitate learning spaces that are grounded in the collective co-creation of intentionality, mindfulness, and radical slowness. Currently, they direct a sliding-scale ceramics studio with Finca Morada, a LGBTQIA+ & BIPOC-centered cooperative of artists, activists, farmers, and nature stewards living within a half-acre urban agroecological food forest garden sanctuary in North Miami, FL.

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