As part of the Artpace Teen Council, our group sat down for an interview with one of Artpace’s spring 2026 resident artists, Violette Bule, to learn more about their journey in art and creative process. We learned about the thoughts and ideas around Hydra, their work created for the spring 2026 exhibition at Artpace. 

As a young person in Venezuela, Bule was interested in different forms of art, including theater and writing, but wasn’t sure of their long-term career goals. While waiting at a stoplight, they saw an advertisement for a photography school and decided to give it a try. Once they got there, they were intrigued by the chemicals involved in film and darkroom photography. Bule states that they are a “photographer at heart,” but now like working with different media because “I’m a curious person, so I just like to try.” They were inspired by their own curiosity and rebellious spirit to keep creating, but says “I never knew I wanted to be an artist–[it] happened naturally.” 

Violette Bule is notorious for their interactive installations. Their artistic process begins with big ideas and they are particularly interested in exploring the role of power in society. Working with these big ideas, they let materials guide their art and worry about practicality later. Their previous work, AGAINST RE-PRESENT-N-ATION utilizes an enormous claw machine filled with Venezuelan passports to reflect both the difficulty of obtaining one as well as how this impacts citizens’ idea of identity. When talking about the importance of viewers interacting with their work, Violette said art is something that needs to be “activated” by the spectator and that this exchange completes the work. 

Bule’s recent commission for Artpace, HYDRA, is a commentary on immigration, detention centers, and the structure of power in the American government. The piece is made up of four core components. Firstly, TV screens mounted on the wall display past United States Presidents addressing citizens, overlapped with current President Donald J. Trump’s speeches on immigration control.  A teleprompter near these screens displays a poem written by Bule themselves, No Pause, amid a net of painted razor wire that covers the floor of the exhibit. The last and perhaps most noticeable component: a large, golden revolving door in the center. The door is a metaphor for repeating history, including the flow of affluent people in and out of power.

This relates to Bule’s notion of the American dream: although their work is focused on power structure and history repeating itself, they believe that the American Dream continues to thrive due to the diversity of our nation. Different perspectives allow us to rethink our ideals and bring individual ideas and experiences to a common understanding. As Bule says, despite difficult times, we can take hope in the fact that “America keeps dreaming.”