Bio
Brenda is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator born in Mexico City. Through painting, ceramic sculpture, and photography, her work explores place as memory, place as material, and place as self.
Her journey has taken her from Texas to Italy, the U.K., New York City, New England, the Rocky Mountains and the Middle East - shaping a practice that is both global and deeply personal. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, attended residencies in Greece, Maine, and Wyoming, and was named a 2021 Carter Community Artist with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.
Brenda 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 Interdisciplinary MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Now based in Fort Worth with her husband and three sons, Brenda continues to teach, create, and share her layered vision of place and identity.
Artist Statement
Memory is a surrealist dream: at once crisp and grainy, unruly and vibrant, and, suddenly, discolored with age. Somewhere between wakefulness and dream, my practice is a voyage through a personal history of nostalgic attachments to place — and a grasping at definition. Incomplete memories mined from a family archive populated with secrets, regrets, and idealistic, impossible hopes, the work reconfigures uncertainty into tangible, if unlikely, alternative realities.
Shaped by my experiences of displacement and migration, my current work explores place as memory, place as material, and place as self. The work revolves around material and site-specificity: I travel to places with personal meaning in order to forage the wild clay, plants, minerals and source imagery for my work. I do this to steward ancient craft and connect with my history, but also to complicate contemporary concepts of family, landscape, borders, ownership, and belonging.
Rooted in indigenous Mesoamerican and contemporary Mexican art and craft as well as European art historical traditions of landscape, portraiture and still-life, my practice, like me, exists in the in-between of multiple identities and places. The resulting paintings, photomontage, ceramic sculpture, and video confront the selective, intensely subjective, and inevitably malleable nature of remembrance through deeply personal recontextualization.