Yvette Mayorga’s Family History Is Baked Into Her Work

26.09.2024 - 06:31 / nytimes.com

Yvette Mayorga’s exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara takes her back to the place she always talks about leaving. Throughout her career, she has made art about her family’s journey from the Mexican state of Jalisco to Chicago, exploring her immigrant parents’ struggle to gain an economic foothold in the United States, starting in the 1970s. Mayorga, who is 33, also examines how first-generation Americans like herself sort out their cultural identities.

Mayorga’s signature approach is to apply acrylic paint to canvas, using pastry tubes, piping out thick, frilly lines that resemble frosting on the fancy wedding and birthday cakes that are popular in Mexico and within Mexican American communities. The technique recognizes cross-border connections while also honoring the physical labor by many immigrants when they arrive in the United States.

The Guadalajara exhibition, Mayorga’s first international solo show, is titled “La Jaula de Oro” (“The Golden Cage”), a term meant to be a metaphor for the false promises of immigration. Curated by Maya Renée Escárcega, it features paintings inspired by family photos, as well as clay pieces made during a recent residency at the city’s storied Cerámica Suro factory. The museum is bathed in bright pink, including its facade and interior walls, which were custom colored for the occasion. The show’s centerpiece, a pink 1974 Datsun station wagon that was bought online and that Mayorga decorated in her flowery style, symbolizes the mobility of immigrant families like the artist’s own.

Below are edited excerpts from a recent video interview with Mayorga, who was in Chicago.

I use acrylic paint and an acrylic medium that makes the paint a little bit more dense. Then I mix it with whatever color that I’m working with and then put it inside of a piping bag. So, it’s almost like I’m drawing with it and making lines that are a drawing of the painting itself — like a guideline for me to know where I’m going to fill in and have the most relief, and then I can go back and forth in those areas. And then it dries. That’s why I’m usually working on four pieces at once, because while one work is drying, then I do it to the others.