Bio
Brenda is a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist and poet born in Mexico City and based in Texas. Incorporating painting, sculpture, and elements of the photographic, she describes her work as a manifested yearning to propagate roots, to cultivate connection through engagements with the natural world and memory over the course of a lifetime. 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.
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 and poet born in Mexico City and based in Texas. My work is a yearning to propagate roots, to cultivate connection through engagements with the fleeting: the natural world and memory. I dwell in and create through the question of what it means to be, or to once again become, indigenous — to place, to others, and to myself.
An expanded genre of landscape in the service of self-reclamation, my work is a series of painted and sculpted self-portraits in which I create dream-like memories out of water, color, and earth, the serendipitous nature of water on Yupo contrasting with the intentionality and gravity of clay. Proxies for the self, plant and place are layered with floating, deracinated elements from memories and photographs, an intertwining of painting, collage, and ceramics that evokes memory as I experience it. Abstracted, seemingly disconnected sensory impressions that coalesce into accidental harmonies explore how material and color can signify and reclaim place and culture, how transparency and opacity can connote absorption and resistance, and how layers and negative space can serve as a form of wistful time travel. An insistent pairing of the real and unreal is grounded in Mexican Magical Realism, a genre uniquely suited to addressing topics of personal decolonization, engagement with which has facilitated the disentanglement and reintegration of what I once felt were competing sides of the self.