Bio
Brenda is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator born in Mexico City. Through painting, ceramic sculpture, and photography, her work explores place as memory, place as material, and place as self.
Her perspective is informed by a life lived crossing borders — geographic, cultural, and conceptual: Her journey has taken her from Mexico toTexas to Italy, the U.K., New York City, New England, the Rocky Mountains, the Middle East and back to Texas again — shaping a practice that is both global and deeply personal. She has exhibited her work nationally and attended residencies in Greece, Maine, and Wyoming. In 2021 she was named a Carter Community Artist with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.
Brenda 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 Interdisciplinary MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Brenda teaches ceramics and art history at Tarrant County College where she is committed to expanding access to art and craft in her community. She is based in Fort Worth, TX with her husband and three sons, where she writes, teaches, and continues to share her layered vision of place and identity by exhibiting regularly.
Artist Statement
My work explores place as memory, place as material, and place as self. I travel to landscapes of personal and ancestral significance to forage wild clay, minerals, plants and source imagery for my work. These materials steeped in place are processed into ceramic sculpture created using hand-building and pit-firing methods rooted in indigenous Mesoamerican and contemporary Mexican art and craft. The resulting work carries the geological and cultural memory of a specific place or places and embodies the unfixed, layered nature of memory and identity.
This work is driven by a life lived crossing borders and negotiating origin and belonging through a lens of displacement and cultural plurality. Alongside the ceramics, I create watercolor paintings and photomontage rooted in European traditions of landscape, portraiture, and still-life and which draw from my own and my family’s extensive photographic archive of memories and inherited imagery. The work exists — as I do — in the in-between of multiple identities and places.
Together, the sculpture, painting, and photomontages are combined to create installations that examine what it means to carry multiple places within oneself — constantly reshaped by the ongoing influence of personal landscapes encountered through movement, migration, and memory.