Bio
Brenda is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator born in Mexico City. Incorporating painting, ceramic sculpture, and elements of the photographic, she describes her visual work as a manifested yearning to propagate roots, to cultivate connection and indigeneity through engagements with the natural world and memory. Mostly raised in Texas, she has also lived / studied in Italy, the U.K., New York City, New England, the Rocky Mountains and the Middle East. She has shown her work nationally and internationally and recently attended the Mudhouse Residency in Crete, Greece.
Brenda currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and three sons where she shows, teaches, and maintains a regular artistic practice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Classical Civilizations from the University of Notre Dame, a Master of Science in Education from The City College of New York, and an MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She was a 2021 Carter Community Artist with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist born in Mexico City and based in Texas. Displacement and migration have fundamentally shaped my perspective. Rooted in both indigenous Mesoamerican craft and European art historical traditions of landscape, still life, and portraiture, my practice, like me, exists in the in-between of two identities forced to co-exist. In my work, I seek to understand how our identities are informed by our connections and disconnections to place.
My current work revolves around material and site-specificity; I forage wild clay and minerals from places with personal meaning to create ceramic sculpture and paintings. I do this to steward ancient craft, but also to complicate concepts like landscape, borders, or ownership. The resulting objects are hybrids: souvenir-talismans which conjure associations to specific places, making intangible connections manifest.
Through these intentional engagements with memory and the natural world, I blur the line between the self and nature, allowing displaced plants and landscapes to become protagonists with complex histories, cultures, and attachments from which we can probe complex truths.