SPRING 2024 RESIDENT: NARSISO MARTINEZ

Narsiso Martinez’s (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) drawings and mixed media installations include multi-figure compositions set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez’s portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through use of found materials, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers.

SPRING 2023 RESIDENT: FELIPE BAEZA

Felipe Baeza (b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico) works and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Fusing collage, painting, printmaking, and other techniques to create multilayered, textural works that explore notions of the body and migration, Baeza’s sensually rich and visually arresting works evoke both mythic dimensions and contemporary themes. His figures created over densely layered paintings appear in different states of becoming and at times are even abstracted to the point of invisibility.

FALL 2023 RESIDENT: NURIA MONTIEL

Nuria Montiel (b 1982, Mexico City) generates participatory and collaborative spaces that foster encounters to expand our experience and understanding of the world. Urban drifts and traveling across territories are recurrent methodologies in her practice to engage with a place and its communities. For her MFA project, she looked at Oaxaca textiles’ traditions, Anni Albers and the Bauhaus School to trace the influence of Mesoamerican culture in Western Art. Stencils of soil, weavings, typography and codes, body and movement are elements to meditate about possible echoes, resonances, fragmentation and change in knowledge through different cultures in time. Nuria obtained a BFA at Facultad de Artes y Diseño (FAD-UNAM) and continued her studies at Soma in Mexico City. Her most recent work was been presented at Cuarto de Máquinas and Museo Nacional de la Estampa in Mexico City, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and Project Row Houses in Houston.

SPRING 2022 RESIDENT: ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA

Arleene Correa Valencia is a multidisciplinary and community oriented native Mexican artist living and working in Napa, CA. Correa Valencia investigates various ethical, political, and aesthetic strategies in her practice to address the effects of our current socio-political and ecological climate on undocumented communities in the U.S.

In 2020 Correa Valencia completed her MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She was featured in the Emmy award winning “Portraits of Napa Workers: Arleene Correa Valencia,” part of KQED Arts’ Represent series of artist profiles. She is a recipient of Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals and is one of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family migrated to the United States in 1997 and made a home in California’s wine country, Napa Valley.

FALL 2022 Resident: MAZATL

Mazatl is a graphic maker who uses the public space as his main way to communicate ideas and emotions seeking to create conversations towards collective liberation. His work is characterized by interventions of large scale woodcuts in the public areas, as well as graphic murals. He dedicates a large part of his work towards collaborating with groups, collectives, other artists and movements that seek social, political and environmental justice in our communities. He is a member of Justseeds Artists' Cooperative and APC (Animal Power Crew). Mazatl lives in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico where he part takes in several collectives seeking social/political/enviromental justice; his art is inspired by the work individuals and collectives do to shake off the noose around our necks.