Art & Being Studio
My educator journey.
I am an art educator and artist. I became interested in teaching while working as an arts enrichment facilitator with a youth development non-profit in 2015. Working with at-risk youth catalyzed my passion for mentoring and engaging with young people. With visual art, I can communicate with students, and empower their natural abilities and need for self-expression. In 2017, I completed the UCLArts & Healing program in social and emotional development in the arts. By the fall of 2020, I solidified these interests to pursue a Master of Art in Art Education at Boston University online and graduated in 2022.
Art making as education.
Art is a way of communicating with the world. Educators reinforce “important ideas and themes associated with traditional and contemporary art-making practices” (Gude, 2007), which deepen the visual language of art across cultures and centuries. Art educators in today’s learning landscape employ multiple skills from knowledge and mastery of various mediums to contextualizing curricula to meet the student’s needs.
Gude, O. (2007). Principles of possibility: Considerations for a 21st-century art & culture curriculum. Art Education, 60(1), 6-17.
“Art is the soul of a people.”
Artist Statement
If visual art is a language, photography is my go-to dialect for engaging in conversations around memory, identity, and place. I use analog photographic processes, such as cyanotype, to investigate, recontextualize and portray subjects that may otherwise go unnoticed if kept strictly in their digital form. As in the case of The Journalists series (2022), this requires the use of publicly available imagery, specifically from news content about the killing of journalists. The use of portraiture here serves a double purpose by spotlighting specific individuals and shedding light on a worldwide crisis that is costing journalists’ lives often with impunity.
By becoming a U.S. citizen and living the majority of my life in the United States, my work in the Güegüense Americano series (2022 - ongoing) is informed by a tightrope walk on topics such as cultural hegemony, memory, and embodying the dualities inherent to acculturation. With photographic montage, I re-engage with images of Nicaragua as an account of my roots, while places in contemporary Miami, Florida serve to counterbalance my narrative as an immigrant. Specifically, the use of the güegüense mask is an homage to Nicaragua’s folkloric traditions that speak of power plays between cultures and the idiosyncratic nature of maintaining a dual identity.
Contact.
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