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 self, place as memory, and place as material.
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
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 seek to understand how our identities are informed by our connections and disconnections to place.
My current work revolves around material and site-specificity; I forage wild clay and minerals from places with personal meaning to create ceramic sculpture and paintings. I do this to steward ancient craft, but also to complicate concepts like landscape, borders, or ownership. The resulting objects are hybrids: souvenir-talismans which conjure associations to specific places, making intangible connections manifest.
Through these intentional engagements with memory and the natural world, I blur the line between the self and nature, allowing displaced plants and landscapes to become protagonists with complex histories, cultures, and attachments from which we can probe complex truths.