Mónica Chelo

Mónica Chelo is a textile artist and painter born in 1991 in Panama. In 2010, she moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to pursue a degree in Textile and Fashion Design. She currently lives and works in Mexico City where here artistry developed into what it is today.

Her practice integrates textile manipulation, painting and sculpture, rooted in the body as a territory of memory. She works from intuition and gesture, transforming textile, clay and paint into extensions of the intimate and the ancestral.

She explores themes of identity, belonging and the experience of being an Afro-descendant woman from Panama, interweaving the individual with the collective and the everyday with the symbolic.

She is currently developing research on Afro-Mexican and Afro-Caribbean identity and its intersections, while integrating new human concepts into her body of work.

Northwest Carrer and Technical Academy
Las Vegas, NV, USA (2007)
Diploma with emphasis on hospitality and marketing

Universidad de Palermo
Buenos Aires, Argentina (2010)
Fashion and Textile Design

INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITION

MEXICO
Grietas | Interior C (2026)

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

MEXICO
Salón Cosa (2021), Servidor Local (2022), Xilófago Galería (2022) Mujeres Creadoras (2025), MUYGUUD (2026)

INTERNATIONAL GALLERIES AND ART FAIRS
Objective Gallery in The Feelings We Wear (Shanghai, 2021), 315 Spring Street and Sexy (New York, 2022), as well as the international art fair Art021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair (Shanghai, 2021).