Categories: Craft, Teaching Artist, Traditional Arts, Visual Arts, Community Arts

I believe we are all cultural bearers…

It is my role not only as an artist, but as an immigrant, a woman, to create and reproduce culture. This is, in fact, the very basis of my survival.

Collaboration, radical pedagogy, and community building are central to my art practice and projects. My identity, experiences, and artistic decisions are shaped by the reality that I am an immigrant Mexican born-Latinx American artist living in New York City.

Formally trained as a painter, my creative practice is greatly influenced and informed by folk art and popular culture, from papel picado to comic books. I combine traditional and contemporary art practices and techniques, as well as sociocultural-based mythologies and philosophies as a way to preserve evidence of the past, not for sentimental reasons, but as a form of nourishment for the creative spirit of the present. Through art, I want to create alternative, yet accessible, and inclusive dialogues around the challenges and controversies we experience in society.

My creative work is driven by my profound interest in traditional techniques and personal, cultural concerns. My current project involves research I began at the Hispanic Society in NYC in 2021 and expanded during my residency at Wave Hill this past winter. After experiencing COVID-19, I learned of the existence of the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano or the Aztec Herbal book in the Hispanic Society’s library collection. The Codex de la Cruz-Badiano was made by Nahua knowledge keepers in the 16th century.  In the middle of a global pandemic, I had the opportunity to sit with this book about healing, our physical selves and the collective body.

As the field begins to turn attention to decolonizing museum spaces, I am invested in the ways in which we re-indiginize our own practices as artists. What are the tools of survival we inherent from our ancestors and their traditions?  What can they teach us, not only about how we make work, but how we move in the world, how we share and create space?

I am currently unearthing new ways to deepen this fascinating work.

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