Chandra Méndez-Ortiz

I’m a lover of history, stories, music, and all the things that create and shape culture. I grew up listening to my grandmother Margaret Odom’s stories about why her father came to America from Cuba, growing up in Key West, life in the Jim Crow South and her eventual migration north to Paterson, New Jersey. Her stories were so vivid, funny, sorrowful, and full of life that it influenced the way I wanted to tell stories. When I was 16, I first saw the work of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and it was an epiphany for me. It was the first time that I saw a major retrospective of a living Black artist in a museum. His work told stories in ways that made history real to me. The composition, rhythm, and emotion of the work made me feel a part of something greater than myself. When I went to college, I studied history and art to seek answers to the larger questions of why things are the way they are. Since then I’ve been marinating on the origins of U.S. society and our laws, politics, economics, and environment, etc. Part of my work as an artist and educator has always been about finding ways to connect with others, make sense of, and do good in the world.

The work in this exhibition brings together two different but connected bodies of work. The Brown Series references the heritage and many shades of my family; our connection to the land; and the browning of America. In these large scale paintings on paper I visualize often told stories of my family's migration from Cuba and life in Key West Florida in the early 1900’s and each generation's subsequent pursuit of the American dream. In addition to my grandmother’s stories, my mother’s influence is deeply embedded in this work. As a young single mother raising three children, her life and relationship to labor has been a poignant influence for me.  Identity, colorism, migration, citizenship, labor, scarcity, and abundance are all present.

Relax and Chill is a series of mixed media paintings on canvas that explore what it means for us to relax within dense, chaotic and uncertain times. I continue to reflect on notions of work and labor, and how to manifest moments of respite through finding connection in nature, summertime, gardening, or even general stillness.

I find painting and collage to be the most fluid mediums through which to connect nonlinear histories, places, memories, and dreams. Through stitching together the personal, historical, and the contemporary, I honor, learn from, and reimagine the ways in which people of color, particularly Black and Latino people, navigate and contribute to American life

Ceci Méndez-Ortiz

I am mesmerized by beauty found in ‘ordinary’ places. I love the everyday-ness of things and objects. And I’m drawn to the infinite possibilities offered by color and pattern. 

My passion for experiencing beauty in everyday simplicity was nurtured in part by my mother’s / family business “Fabric Artworks,” started in the late 1970s after my parents immigrated to the U.S. from Panamá. I would travel to textile factories and craft stores with my mother Yolanda to buy the fabrics that would eventually be transformed into clothing, pillows, quilts, and wall hangings. As a child I would stack fabric remnants in ways that deeply gratified my aesthetic sensibilities. By the time I was twelve, I was making my own shirts and pants - a lot of them - from fabulously patterned cloth.

In 1995 I opened my mail and saw - for the first time really saw - the envelope that would begin my obsession with / collection of security envelopes. Even though I would not make anything with them for nearly another decade, I collected these glorious patterned papers and organized them with the same care and curiosity I had taken with the fabrics of my earlier years.

Given the relative ease of mining personal data and entire identities in today’s world, I am captivated by these objects designed to ostensibly obscure the private information lurking within. These ‘security’ mechanisms of our so-called information age, I find their invention and use imbued with tremendous social meaning related to issues of identity, privacy, ownership, worth, consumption, possession, and control. 

The thousands of envelopes I use are sourced from many people across the U.S. (some beyond), and all have traveled through snail mail. I am an analogue soul, and my work is a labor of love and a practice of patience. I take great pleasure and time in meticulously dissecting the envelopes and slicing, arranging, overlaying, and weaving the pieces to create visual worlds evocative of textiles and textures, as well as personal journeys, maps, and landscapes.

This exhibition represents my musings on our natural planetary world, both with and without human interruption. As I make these works, I keep in mind and heart both known and anonymous histories, individual and collective identity, labor, invention, utility, disaster, reverence, and play.