Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Threads from Border-landia

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present two concurrent solo exhibitions from Consuelo Jimenez Underwood at both our San Antonio and New York City galleries. 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. The artist is also the subject of a publication, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving Vision, a recent comprehensive analysis of her work and impact on feminist textile art history. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was born in Sacramento, California to a family of campesinos. As a youth she was placed in a fruit crate while her parents picked the rich agricultural fields and orchards from Sacramento to Calexico, California. It was during this time that Jimenez Underwood developed her unique tri-cultural perspective: Chicana/Indigenous/American. Using this voice Jimenez Underwood interweaves themes and imagery that reflect and revisit social memories.

“Redefining the practice of weaving, Jimenez Underwood works with repurposed barbed wire, yellow caution tape, safety pins, and plastic bags and crosses Indigenous, Chicana, European, and Euro-American art practices, pushing the arts of the Americas beyond Eurocentric aesthetics toward culturally hybrid and Indigenous understandings of art making. Jimenez Underwood’s redefinition of weaving and painting alongside the socially and environmentally engaged dimensions of her work position her as one of the most vital artists of our time.” - Excerpt from Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving Vision, Pérez, Laura E. and Ann Marie Leimer, Editors, Duke University Press, 2022.

Recent as well as historic works from Jimenez Underwood’s oeuvre are featured in both exhibitions. In San Antonio, One Nation Underground features a large-scale textile work that combines the United States and Mexico flags. Embellished with various fibers, fabric, and barbed wire, the work references the intermingling of culture along the U.S.-Mexico border. In New York City, the artist’s historical 1991 work Night Lights integrates silk screen and weaving techniques. Warholian images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Aztec goddess Coatlicue explore gender, spirituality, and icons.

About the Artist

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood received her BA and MA in Art 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 assumed the role of Professor and Director of the Fiber Area, a position she has held for more than two decades. 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, among others.

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