Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist and lifelong Bay Area resident with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from University of California Berkeley. My work reflects my background as a Guatemalan-American artist, and I seek to unveil the root causes and systems that have contributed to our severed relationship with the natural world, and the continued erasure of indigeneity from contemporary contexts. My interest in vintage items, textiles, identifying wild mushrooms and plants, and relationships to objects and inhabited spaces and their often westernized origins inform my aesthetic and conceptual choices in my practice. Having worked with ceramic for over a decade and painting and drawing for even longer, I aim to create engaging and activated compositions that draw the viewer’s eye with small details and visually endearing figures.

While At Headlands

As a Bay Area artist and UC Berkeley MFA graduate, I am eager to transition my practice at Headlands Center for the Arts. My work, which bridges my lifelong Bay Area home and my own ancestral ties to Guatemala, uses figurative ceramic sculptures to translate my research into Maya cosmology and contemporary land resistance. At Headlands, I intend to transition this research into painting to explore atmosphere, erosion, and time, moving from permanent monumentality to unstable, porous visual narratives.

The Marin Headlands’ layered history of militarization and preservation offers a powerful parallel to Guatemala’s volcanic and colonial landscapes. Working in this terrain will allow me to explore diaspora, memory, and our connection to land. I look forward to engaging with Headlands’ multidisciplinary community, embracing critical dialogue to push my practice beyond medium and let process-driven experimentation reshape my work post-graduation.