La Señora de las Piñatas Artwork

When I was a boy growing up in New York City, I remember visiting my grandmother in the Garment District of Midtown Manhattan. She worked in a factory making hats, surrounded by many other immigrants like herself. She was happy to have the work and proud of her craft. While traveling through the Piñata District of Downtown Los Angeles, I'm reminded of my grandmother when I see a woman hard at work, carrying on with steely determination under the summer sun, her smooth bare arms belying ripples of strength--triangles formed between the ground, her body, and a long-slender aluminum pole bending slightly under the weight of a cake-shaped piñata pendant from its very end. The piñata lady transports me in time, and upon my I return I realize my connection to this place. I'm tethered to the immigrant experience in America through my grandmother, my mother, and my father, all of who held me aloft--like a slender metal rod, bent but unbowed, dangling a cake-shaped piñata, floating on the end of a wire. I am grateful, and solemn. "La Señora de las Piñatas" 30 x 30 x 2.5 in Acrylic, sumi ink, cotton rag mat, vintage map, Spanish-language newspaper, 99.9% pure silver leaf, resin, on deep-cradled wood panel