Lio N. Bonaccio

Artist

2024 – A Girl Is A Gun

2024 – Blessings

About Lio

Lio Bonaccio (2002) is an interdisciplinary artist located in Midtown NYC. Lio’s body of work is about their gender-queerness/two-spirit, and Indigenous identity. They’ve throughout their life, experienced a reconnection to their racial and queer identity, that has them confronting ideas of how dislocation and queerness can make one feel so out of place yet also resilient and strong. In their photographic works they channel these emotions by using AFAB models and staged portraiture.

They are also fascinated by the tangibility of the film photograph, leaving intentional marks and fingerprints on some of their final pieces to show the beauty in something that is now changed through the physicality of touch.

Lio’s Paintings and mixed media drawings focus on the reflection of their childhood and heritage through the replication of photos of their Indigenous family members that have sat in untouched dusty scrapbooks. They aim to bring these photos to life by utilizing painted beadwork, bright colors, and the confrontation of Indigenous stereotyping, to show that there is not one singular way to exist as an Indigenous person in the world.

Photo wORKS

2024 – Aaron