Michael Amquy

Michael Amquy is a Miami-born multidisciplinary artist whose work emerges from the intersection of deeply personal experience and a rich cultural inheritance. The son of a Lakota Brazilian father and a Ukrainian mother, Michael grew up navigating multiple traditions — raised within the Lakota tribal culture by his father, and introduced to visual expression at an early age by his mother. These two worlds continue to shape the way he sees and creates.

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His practice is rooted in abstract painting, through which he channels inner spiritual energy, emotion, and the complexity of everyday life. Nature is a recurring presence in his work — a source of grounding and strength. Growing up neurodivergent in a world that rarely made room for him, Michael found in art a language uniquely his own: a space where what cannot be said can be painted.

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Amquy has actively invested in his artistic development through institutions central to Miami's creative landscape. He completed workshops at the De La Cruz Collection and, in 2018, joined Carolina Sardi Studio as an artist in residency, where he began exploring fashion design, graffiti, and freestyle drawing — developing his own graffiti-inspired T-shirt line. In 2020, he deepened his formal painting practice through classes at Oolite Arts with Pablo Contrisciani and Antuan Rodríguez.

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His first solo exhibition was presented in 2021 at Carolina Sardi Studio in Little Haiti, Miami, where he showed a selection of over 100 canvases completed during the Covid-19 pandemic — a body of work marked by urgency, introspection, and creative momentum. Today, Amquy continues working in acrylics on canvas and drawing, constantly experimenting with new techniques and formats as he builds toward completing his formal education.