Studio Arts Department Chair Daisy Quezada Ureña Awarded LatinX Artist Fellowship
Daisy Quezada Ureña (Mexican-American), the Studio Arts Department Chair and faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), has been selected for the third cohort of the prestigious LatinX Artist Fellowship, annually awarded to “15 of the most compelling Latinx visual artists working in the US today,” collaboratively offered by the US Latinx Art Forum and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. [1]
Ureña is a multidisciplinary artist—within her practice, she creates ceramic works, installations, and artist’s books that thematically connect to ideas around identity and place in relation to social structures that cross imposed borders.
“As a Mexican-American artist, I am informed by my cultural background from both Mexico and the United States,” Quezada Ureña says. “I address social issues that substantiate a voice with an overarching identity of being cast aside. My work bridges the personal to the social, forming a relationship to immigration, gender inequality, labor, and class issues that have resulted in a population that has been left devalued and lost within their own culture. Using an altered lace draping technique, I use my garments or items donated by people on either side of the border. I create complex and intimate works that could be considered private in nature. I take garments of individuals through a transformation state using porcelain slip. Drawing from the internal vulnerability carried by each garment, the works act as imprints of past states and are a culmination of identities, collected and externalized.”
Daisy Quezada Ureña
In 2016, she cofounded Present Cartographers, a collective invested in strategies and perspectives from national and international artists and writers amid a migration crisis and resurgence of territorial claims in local and international border zones. Terreno: Borderland Linguistics and bosque brotante are among their publications.
Quezada Ureña has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including in the following exhibitions: Korean International Ceramic Biennale, Gyeonggi Ceramic Museum (Icheon, South Korea); Indigenous Women: Border Matters, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian and UNM Maxwell Museum of Anthropology; Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place, The Denver Art Museum; Concept: Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (New Taipei Taiwan); Wuhan International Ceramic Exhibition, Hubei Institute of Fine Arts (Wuhan, China).
The Institute of American Indian Arts congratulates Daisy Quezada Ureña for her selection as a LatinX Artist Fellow and the honor of being nationally recognized for her work.