Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was born in Sacramento, California. She received her BA and MA from San Diego State University, San Diego, CA. In 1987, Jimenez Underwood received an MFA in Art from San Jose University, San Jose, California, where she immediately assumed the role of Professor and Director of the Fiber Area for more than two decades. In 2022, the artist was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship, a first-of-its-kind initiative that recognizes 15 of the most compelling Latinx visual artists working in the United States today. She is the subject of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving Vision, a comprehensive analysis of her work and impact on feminist textile art history.

"Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s artwork is marked by her compassionate and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues, from immigration and environmental precarity to the resilience of Indigenous ancestral values and the necessity of decolonial aesthetics in art making. Drawing on the fiber arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminist art, and Indigenous fiber- and loom-based traditions, Jimenez Underwood’s art encompasses needlework, weaving, painted and silkscreened pieces, installations, sculptures, and performance." - From Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving Vision

Her work is featured in numerous permanent collections: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; Mexican Fine Art Center Museum, Chicago, IL; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; National Hispanic Center for The Arts, Albuquerque, NM; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Oakland Museum of California; Oakland, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others.

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Consuelo Jimenez Underwood at the Armory Show 2023. Jimenez Underwood has been exhibiting her work since the 1980s, choosing to focus on the fiber arts at a time when weaving was considered “craft,” not “art.” As the daughter of a Huichol-descended father who weaved and a Mexican-American mother who embroidered, it has always been important to the artist to continue these ancestral practices and insist on their legitimacy in the artistic sphere. Her initial goal as an artist was to become a “footnote in history,” but in recent years she has far surpassed her ambition. In 2022, Duke University Press published an anthology on her decades-long career, titled Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision, and she was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship the same year.