the colors of the days
los colores de mis días
La Casita, Fort Worth, May 2025
Curated by: Maria Elena Ortiz
Walking down a dusty road, on an anonymous street in a place she’d never known of or been before, she saw the pink house with the cactus in front of it and wondered: what if my grandmother still lived here and I could walk up, knock on the door, give her a hug and kiss, and step back into her kitchen to help her make chicken soup for dinner?
Instead she took a picture of it on a beige Tuesday,
in a place that felt like Saturday.
I found out on a Wednesday, and Wednesday is a cloud. On a Wednesday I walked into a house after almost twenty years and found pictures of myself I’d never seen adorning every wall - old, cared-for pictures of a father, a grandmother, an uncle and cousin I’d never known. They were all hugging me.
I recognized only myself. I recognized my eyes, I recognized my smile and then, suddenly, maybe because of how the color of the dress I was wearing felt, I recognized the smell that hung in the air. It was pozole and it felt like a Saturday because Saturday is a passing cloud revealing a splendid rainbow across a blue sky, the exuberant saturation the world has only in the moments just after it has rained and, suddenly, the sun comes out.
“Hija, I’m very devoted to the Virgin Mary. It would make me so happy if you would join me in lighting a candle at her altar this afternoon to give thanks for your return after all these years.” “Claro, Abuelo.”
My grandfather died on the same sunny day as I’d given birth to my last son eight years earlier in another mountain city. He lived through the death of his only love, his only daughter, and the disappearance of his first granddaughter. We never went to the altar the day I returned, but he told me that one of the memories of me he’d held dearest in my absence was that of me praying to the Virgin in a church when I was three years old, just months before the last time he saw me.
“Fuiste un milagro,” he would say.
What if I trace the geographic contours of the place I was born and suddenly remember what it felt like to be raised there (the little plastic tub for bath time, the grass tickling my legs as I lay in the garden, the way we left in a blue car one day and never came back)?
Pepino, Papaya
It was a Sunday when we were living in London when I heard Nigella Lawson say on television that her mother used to cut strips off the skin of cucumbers so they looked striped before slicing them for a salad and I thought: how funny, my Mexican mother does that too. “I don’t expect you to do it too, it’s just a habit of maternal legacy,” she said.
My dad hated papaya, but my biological father always had one on his kitchen counter and, one time, when I was 35, on a warm and yellow Sunday, I came down from bed and he had prepared a small plate of sliced papaya just for me with lots of lime juice and brown sugar, just the way I like it,
strips of golden skin lay discarded in the trash,
rays of orange golden sunshine cut carefully and thrown away
by a father that they told me had no interest in raising me
when I was born (is a Sunday).
You still remind me of the time we climbed a pomegranate tree somewhere in Campania, somewhere in the heart of the autumn and, drunk, in love, I plucked a bright red fruit and jumped down, ripped the skin off and stuffed my mouth completely full with the seeds and then I turned and kissed you passionately and spat all the seeds in your mouth too and we laughed and kissed so hard they spilled all over the ground and it was a Thursday, and Thursday is a green tree near the ocean, well-worth the climb.
lo que el agua me dió (what the water gave me)
Scrambling through dry mountains on a hot and sunny Wednesday in my 40s (Wednesday is a sunny cloud), my children running in many directions, I paused to catch my fuchsia breath, parched, on an unplanned hike.
Near my left foot I noticed a small hole in the ground. I crouched and saw that in it water bubbled frantically from an underground stream. It bubbled without stopping, but the water never overflowed, and I thought, “it was here all the time, beneath me, following my path.”
The wind was a little bit restless the day she was playing in the little white plastic pool that her mother had bought her. She entertained herself, naked, in slightly-too-cold water, while she was at work, and she had to stay with her grandmother.
The dog didn’t seem overly-bothered when the wind picked up and carried the girl away into a pink and endless sky over the largest city in the world.
Luckily, she grabbed her towel and pulled it into the pool with her just before it disappeared overboard into the Valley of Mexico. I never saw them again.
curatorial statement | Maria Elena Ortiz
Inspired by personal memories, Indigenous Mesoamerican craft and European art traditions, Brenda Melgoza Ciardiello presents the exhibition The Colors of the Days. Realized in an intimate apartment, this exhibition includes a variety of media, ranging from sculptures, photographs, video and paintings, in which the artist explores childhood memories, landscapes, and dreams. In The Colors of the Days, she places her artworks within the settings of a lived-in apartment to create an ambience that alludes to a surrealist dream or an uncanny encounter, merging lived experiences with alternative realities. She invites the viewer into her family archive, creating a physical representation for the multiplicity of her identity.
As a child Melgoza Ciardiello grew up between Texas and Mexico City–a transcultural experience of diaspora and movement that informs her works. Having to negotiate living in divergent places, she incorporates motifs of these landscapes into her paintings, videos and photographs. Some of these symbols are the iconic Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, as well as images of figs, papayas, and prickly pear cactus plants. At times, she includes images of herself as a child placed within these characters, embodying her memories and transcultural connections. Fascinated with Mesoamerican pottery, Melgoza Ciardiello creates ceramics and sculptures that explore the human body and the folk practice of milagros–also known as ex-votos or religious charms used for healing and prayer. With a nostalgic sensibility, Melgoza Ciardiello creates milagros for her own childhood memories of rupture and displacement.
artist 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.
Currently based in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and three sons, Brenda 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.