ARTIST | EDUCATOR | LEADER
INSTALLATION & PUBLIC WORKS
My installations and commissions designed for public spaces hold complex, visual narratives that occupy and activate large spaces. They tell layered stories; stories that weave together past, present, and future. How people physically navigate the work is what shapes their relationship to, and understanding of, the work. This is very different than, say, a series of discrete objects on a wall. I’m interested in how viewers interact with these works—how scale and material shapes experiences of self, space, and place.
WORKS ON PAPER
I use drawing as a question-based assembly. It is both inquiry and imagination; a conjuring. In recent years, I started drawing on amate, the Mesoamerican bark paper of the ancient codices. Its skin-like surface reminds me to be gentle and responsive; when handled with tenderness, amate yields its secrets. Amate is a physical and conceptual ground where I bring ancestral history into dialogue with the present.
CUT PAPER
Papel picado is a traditional, Mexican decorative craft made by cutting elaborate designs into sheets of tissue paper. There is humility, simplicity, and delight in papel picado. It forever reminds me of my mother, who loved the folkloric México-mágico of her childhood and subsequently shared this love with my sister and me. In this body of work, I innovate on papel picado to depict immersive, fantastical landscapes.
PAINTINGS
My training was as a painter in the tradition of Western European oil painting. We studied Cézanne as the father of modern painting as much as we studied his French and Italian forebears. My work synthesizes formal attributes of this tradition—carefully modeled figures painted from life, or, say, deep pictorial space—with the folkloric colors, patterns, spaces, and bodies of my lived experience. I use painting to summon a lush and generous world of female power.
