Bio
Brenda is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator born in Mexico City. Incorporating painting, ceramic sculpture, and elements of the photographic, she describes her visual work as a manifested yearning to propagate roots, to cultivate connection and indigeneity through engagements with the natural world and memory. Mostly raised in Texas, she has also lived / studied in Italy, the U.K., New York City, New England, the Rocky Mountains and the Middle East. She has shown her work nationally and internationally and recently attended the Mudhouse Residency in Crete, Greece.
Brenda currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and three sons where she shows, teaches, and maintains a regular artistic practice. She 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 MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She was a 2021 Carter Community Artist with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist born in Mexico City and based in Texas. Displacement and migration have fundamentally shaped my perspective. Rooted in both indigenous Mesoamerican craft and European art historical traditions of landscape, still life, and portraiture, my practice, like me, exists in the in-between of two identities forced to co-exist. In my work, I document and seek to understand how our identities are informed by our connections and disconnections to place.
My current work revolves around material and site-specificity: an inquiry into our nostalgic attachments to place. I forage site-specific wild clay, minerals, rocks, and sand from places with personal meaning to me to create ceramic sculpture and paintings. I do this in order to learn and steward ancient cultural craft, but also to investigate how, through connection with the earth, I can complicate concepts like landscape, borders, or land ownership. A nod to how we are an accumulation of all the places we have been and all the things we have seen — the objects I create are also multicultural hybrids: souvenir-talisman-milagros which conjure specific memories and connections to place, making the intangible tangible.
Through these intentional engagements with memory and the natural world, I blur the line between the self and nature, allowing displaced plants, landscapes, and fruits to become protagonists with complex histories, cultures, and attachments that inevitably begin to mirror our own but are also deceptively inoffensive foils from which to probe less digestible truths.