Ceci Méndez-Ortiz

Cecilia (Ceci) Méndez-Ortiz (she/her) is a Boston-based artist currently working in drawing, collage, and stop motion animation. She holds a BA with Honors in Art from Brown University, and an MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. Living at the heart of where art, education, and community connect, her installations, prints, drawings, and bilingual animations (Spanish/English) have been exhibited and screened in Mexico, Japan, and across the U.S. Her work is in the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection and numerous private collections.

Ceci is also a seasoned joy-and-justice seeking arts and culture worker, community builder, and arts/education administrator. She is the Executive Director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Co-director of the Radical Imagination for Racial Justice regranting program in Boston, MA. In 2021 Ceci was named a Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts “Next 50” Honoree, one of fifty leaders lighting the way forward toward a more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate world.

My work is a labor of love, and a practice of patience.

I collect many things, including commonly used and recycled materials such as security envelopes; scraps of paper, fabric, and metal; printed cardboard; miniature toys and plastics; rust; castaway objects; and other treasures of daily life. My drawings are often born of thesecollections: kitchen tools, hammers, wrenches, parts and pieces of larger machinery. I often anthropomorphize these items when rendering them, referencing both known and anonymous histories that invoke issues of identity, culture, consumption, invention, utility, and play.

I have collected and recycled mailed business (aka ‘security’) envelopes since 1995, and have to date found hundreds of unique intricate prints in myriad colors and patterns. Given the relative ease of mining personal data and entire identities in today’s world, I am fascinated by these objects designed to ostensibly obscure the private information lurking within. Ironically archaic “security” mechanisms of our so-called information age, their invention and continued use is imbued with tremendous social meaning related to issues of identity, privacy, ownership, worth, and possession. I take great pleasure in meticulously dissecting the envelopes and slicing, arranging, overlaying, and weaving the pieces to create visual worlds that are evocative of textiles and textures, as well as personal journeys, maps, and landscapes.