I grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania and am a mother of three living with my spouse in Unionville, Pa. I am a junior at Penn State, working towards my BA in Women’s Studies and Art double major with a concentration in painting and a minor in Latina/o Studies. My artwork celebrates my Puerto Rican and Cuban ancestry from a feminist perspective and combines my academic interests as well.
I enjoy fusing together the historical and contemporary academic research from a feminist pedagogical standpoint, processed and reflected through my artwork. My art centers on my personal experiences as a feminist Latina in a way that articulates a larger vision of cultural consciousness and intersectionality, where issues of class, race, and gender inform and challenge our understanding of power and solidarity.
My process is layered with writing, research, and actively working thru and into my paintings with body, cultural context and intellectual backbone. I mostly work with acrylic and oil paints as well as mixed-media in abstraction. In each of my paintings, I try to formulate a language that is expressive of a raw emotional state of a given moment. This creative process has allowed me to find my voice and discover new aspects of myself, both personally and academically. I try to complicate understandings of the self – how our identities are lost and regained, created and re-invented, contested and negotiated in making sense of the new, the old, and our historic and contemporary realities. I envision art as a language that creates space for conversation about shifting migrations of racial and gender identities. I have been quite fortunate to find such an enriching dialogue between my Women’s Studies and Art majors.
In June of 2011 I was afforded the opportunity to participate in an embedded education abroad program to La Habana, Cuba. This trip was the culmination of a course cross-listed in the Women’s Studies, Anthropology, and African and African American Studies departments, titled “Latin America & Caribbean Cultures: Race & Gender in the Americas.” This academically intense environment offered an opportunity to see a new perspective, different from what I have learned in the classroom and in my personal life.