"Untitled No. 2" Painting

I am a multidisciplinary artist born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, living and working in New York. Raised among makers, craftspeople and street vendors, I met creativity early — as work, imagination and survival.

Primarily self-taught, I built my practice through studio experimentation, courses, books, museums, galleries and direct observation. New York's visual culture — and adapting to a new language and society — continues to shape my work.

After arriving in the United States at seventeen, a different world opened: museums, galleries and contemporary art, inaccessible before, became my informal education. Looking became a discipline; observation, a language.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & RECOGNITION
2026 — Selected artist, "The New American Flag" — 42nd Community Art Exhibition in Virtual Reality, Circular ArtSpace, Bristol, UK (Oct 12–Nov 3, 2026)
2024 — Group exhibition, "Love Safely, Play Creatively" — National Condom Day Art Show, Brooklyn Community Pride Center, Brooklyn, NY
2022 — Invited artist, POWER: 2nd Annual Juneteenth Celebration, Warwick, NY
2022 — Grant recipient — Orange County Community Arts Grant (for American Dream)
2020 — Solo exhibition, Artisan Emporium Square Market, Middletown, NY

PANELS
Guest Panelist — I.D.E.A. Workshop (arts and community discussion program).

ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT
Self-taught visual artist, practicing since 2015. Development through courses, workshops, artist talks, exhibitions, museum and gallery study, direct observation, and research.

SELECTED PROJECT
American Dream (2021–2025) — completed body of work; exhibition proposed for 2027.

ARTIST STATEMENT
I don’t paint to be liked. I paint what I must.

Since I was a child, I knew I was an artist. My father painted and sold his paintings, and I grew up with paint on my fingers, painting beside him. Largely self-taught — documentaries, observation, little houses built out of clay — my hands were always making things. My father told me I had something different. I believed him.

I begin with curiosity — books, images, clean lines, body shapes — and then I disrupt it. Anxiety arrives, and I tear into the composition. That disruption is not the opposite of my work. It is my work. Strong color, irregular forms, and worn, weathered surfaces emerge: doubt turned into beauty. Then I fill what survives with the day I lived — what I felt, what I saw, what I read, what I couldn’t stop thinking about. My paintings are diaries.