Monday, November 10, 2025
This month, the Long Island Arts Council at Freeport’s Art Alcove, at the Recreation Center, features the work of Arlene Gomez, a Baldwin resident whose journey as an artist has been as rich and varied as the landscapes she paints.
Gomez’s story is one of movement, adaptation and a lifelong search for belonging, both in her community and in her art.
The path that Gomez, 72, took to the Freeport exhibit began with a nudge from her local senior citizens club. She recalls that her tutor, Ralph Cappozzi, encouraged her to submit her work to the council, which was seeking artists to exhibit during Hispanic Heritage Month, Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.
Although she identifies as “Puerto Rican, Spaniard, American,” Gomez insists that her art is not focused on her heritage. “I do more expressionistic, but then realistic at the same time,” she said, noting that her paintings are primarily landscapes.
Born Arlene Bracero-Vallejo in Brooklyn to a military family, she spent her early childhood in Germany before returning to New York. She describes a childhood shaped by frequent moves, and a close-knit family. “We traveled to Germany, military-style, and I was raised there until I was about 8 years old,” she explained.
After returning to Brooklyn, her family lived with her grandparents before settling in Manhattan’s Lower East Side projects. Her father was a sergeant in the army, and Gomez remembers her upbringing as lower income. In 1972, after she married Ivan Gomez, now 75, they moved to Baldwin, where they raised two sons.
Arlene credits her early interest in art to inspiring teachers and mentors.
“I had a teacher there that inspired me with her art,” she recalls of her junior high years JHS 60 Beha on the Lower East Side. While at Washington Irving High School she attended summer programs in art at Pratt and Cooper Union, and later studied design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, launching a career in textile design that lasted 15 years.
Her work in textiles took her to studios and mills across the country, where she created designs and ensured that clients got “exactly the color that he or she wanted.”
Gomez took a break from her career to raise her children, and returned to freelance work once they were older. Art, however, was always part of her life. She continued sketching and painting, but it wasn’t until she joined the Baldwin Senior Citizens Club’s oil painting group six years ago that she began to take landscape art more seriously.
Her landscapes are inspired by the natural world around her. She is drawn to the “rich colors that nature gives us,” she said, and strives to “put my own expression to it.” Landscapes are, for Gomez, a way to feel “more free and appreciative to what the Lord has given us.”
She finds still lifes less compelling, saying, “Still life you can, you know, put a pot and some vegetables or flowers and, you know, it’s just OK, it’s there. But nature itself, it’s mysterious and beautiful at the same time, and still dangerous.”
One of her favorite works was inspired by a photo her nephew took upstate. She was captivated by fog coming in over the hills, and enhanced the scene with her own colors and vision.
Gomez’s sense of belonging has evolved over time. Growing up in New York City, she was always surrounded by family. “We lived with them in their brownstone,” she says of her grandparents describing a childhood where she was rarely alone. Safety and community were paramount, and she noted that “everybody watched over everyone else.”
Today, she said, that sense of community is harder to find, especially in the city.
Her multicultural background sometimes made her feel like an outsider. She recalls not being “accepted by my own because I was fair” and having a “little German accent” as a child. But over time, she learned to navigate multiple languages and cultures, speaking German, Italian and Spanish as well as English, she said.
Having her art displayed in Freeport is deeply meaningful for Gomez. “It made me feel welcome,” she said. “It made me feel I belong to, in other words, to a tribe.”
As she grows older, she finds comfort in her heritage and the community she has found through art, and Baldwin, and Long Island, offer a sense of safety and beauty that she treasures. “It’s beautiful — you see a lot of nature,” she said. “It’s not a lot of concrete, like in the city. The people are very friendly. I just feel safe, and it was great for my sons to grow up.”
It’s the perfect setting for an artist whose work is rooted in the landscapes around her, and this month the Art Alcove at the Rec Center will be the perfect place to see the world through Gomez’s eyes.
