Airco Caravan
AQ is our series of hardcover catalogs celebrating extraordinary women artists. Available on Amazon. Visit the AQ Catalog Webpage to learn more.
Airco Caravan (b. the Netherlands, she/her), featured in AQ Volume VII, earned a BA at HKU, Academy of Arts Utrecht, the Netherlands. After a career in advertising and graphic design, Caravan returned to art and studied silk screening at MK24 in Amsterdam and oil painting at The Art Students League of New York.
Caravan has participated in international exhibitions including Every Woman Biennial in New York, Museum de Fundatie, MOTI Museum, Amsterdam Museum, MOYA Vienna, Arte Museum Korea, and Museum of Memory and Tolerance, Mexico City. She has had solo shows in Amsterdam and New York. She is the creator of attention-grabbing guerrilla art in the public domain, including an illegal 4 ft bronze statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The artist was invited to artist residencies on Governors Island, in De Torenkamer, Amsterdam, and Boeddha in de Linie, in solitude in a bunker. Her art is included in the collections of Amsterdam Museum, Museum Van Loon, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, Westfries Museum in the Netherlands, National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles, USA, and Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.
Caravan was the founder and curator of two Nasty Women Amsterdam fundraiser exhibitions and curator of several group shows in Amsterdam.
Artist Statement
The first thing I had to buy when moving from Amsterdam to New York in 2022 was a spray can of Raid to get rid of the roaches. Unpleasant but very effective.
This sparked the idea of a new body of work. As an activist and feminist artist, I want to create art contributing to a better world. And wouldn’t it be nice if we could spray away all the nasty things in our society? So, I created a growing series of almost 400 products for a better world. Bold, humorous, and colorful. I digitally create the conceptual spray cans and bottles and execute them in various mediums: wall tapestries, wheat-pasted posters, labels on real spray bottles, stuffed soft powers, and handmade, solid cast resin objects.
If We Could Change History
During my artist residency on Governors Island, NYC, in 2025, I researched the history of New York, which was colonized 400 years ago by the Dutch. This work resulted in a series of small, hand-cast resin objects containing materials from historic locations that tell stories we don’t learn about in school, aiming to decolonize our minds, remembering and honoring the Lenape and enslaved Africans in the 17th century.
There’s a direct connection to today; colonization never ended. The Limbs Back spray bottles symbolize the immense pain of the many thousands of amputee children in Gaza.
www.aircocaravan.com
