Statement

My very existence is predicated upon my grandparents’ families who crossed the Mexican border during the Mexican revolution. Thus I have been compelled to depict these focal settings. After traveling to Morocco with 40 teachers to study historical peace, I painted the borders of Israel/Gaza, Syria and Ukraine in response to war. The Atlas Mountains paintings represent for me a heavenly utopian vision of religious and cultural harmony, a high altitude ideal. My Bay Area paintings of the bay removing infrastructure imagine a view before "settlement." I also created a 42 foot 360 degree painting of the SF Bay from the vantage point of an ecological wetlands restoration. I look to these for potential healing and a striving for a better way forward, both socially and ecologically. I am currently working on landscapes of immigration detention centers, present, past and imagined, from Alcatraz to Alligator Alcatraz as well as a series honoring Latino farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley and North Carolina.