Chandra Méndez-Ortiz engages with narratives, history and mark making through a series of inter-related works on paper, canvas, and wood in order to illustrate and connect nonlinear histories, memories, people and places. New worlds are constantly built upon old ones with the old often being destroyed. The future world that I imagine is one in which we are all shades of brown, connected by culture, and nourished by an understanding that we all share both struggles, hopes and responsibility. 

Patch Work Series (Images 01 - 02)
To patch, to mend, to repair, to bring together and strengthen. The Patch Work Series are mixed-media collage works on paper and canvas where I engage with discarded/found materials, narratives and memories in order to construct new meanings, spaces, and possibilities.

Record Player Project (Images 03 - 04)
The Record Player Project is a series of large scale mixed media paintings on canvas that use original black music – blues, jazz and hip hop – as the compositional focus of seeing community through improvisation, rhythm, history, and storytelling. 

Brown Series (Images 05 - 11)
Brown references the many shades of my family; the connection to the land; and the browning of America. Brown is a series of large scale paintings on paper, where I visualize often told stories of my family's migration from Cuba in the early 1900’s and each generation's subsequent pursuit of the American dream. Themes include: identity, colorism, work, migration, scarcity and abundance and what it means to be an American citizen.