Heirloom

Ruiz-Healy Art presents Heirloom, a group exhibition of works curated by Sarah Beauchamp and Yadira Silva. The exhibition will be on view at our San Antonio gallery from June 18 to August 9, 2025, with an opening reception on June 18 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Featured artists include Richard “Ricky” Armendariz, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, César A. Martínez, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Katie Pell, Chuck Ramirez, Carlos Rosales-Silva, and Ethel Shipton, among others. Drawing from the Ruiz-Healy Art archive, the exhibition explores how cultural artifacts, moments, and gestures are embedded in visual language. Heirloom explores everyday objects, inherited materials, symbolic forms, and language to carry, reconstruct, and honor memory.  Artists turn to material such as family photos, ritual items, and heirlooms for preservation and re-contextualization. Objects, sometimes humble and other times ornate, serve as traces of lived experiences.

Several artists use materiality as a direct conduit to memory, their work acting as tactile repositories. Artists such as Carlos Rosales-Silva and Jennifer Ling Datchuk utilize materials to explore how identity is embedded in surfaces, textures, and forms. Carlos Rosales-Silva’s mixed media work, incorporating sand, crushed stone, and glass beads in acrylic on panel, utilizes materials that resonate with US-Mexico border culture, evoking place through abstracted forms. Ling Datchuk, in her work Love Yourself Long Time, created custom-made welcome mats manufactured in China to explore the relationship between labor, migration, and the exoticization of Asian women.

For artists Celia Álvarez Muñoz and Cisco Jiménez, familiar urban elements such as logos, advertisements, and everyday ephemera are catalysts for their practice. In his work Hand Deliver ASAP, Jiménez assembles a combination of imagery and text, ranging from beer logos to shopping tags, creating a chaotic relationship and devising a contemporary iconography for Mexico. Quince nods to a coming-of-age Latin American tradition of a girl turning fifteen. With this work, Álvarez Muñoz practices a form of “visual shopping” that combines typical quinceañera imagery of tiaras with the visual vocabulary of contemporary tattoos, graffiti books, and sign painting.

Heirloom examines how artists reinterpret historical narratives through the use of layered motifs. Artist Michael Menchaca uses imagery and symbols from Mesoamerican codices in their work, depicting cats as migrants and wanderers to challenge popular narratives, especially those concerning their hometown of San Antonio. Lina Puerta, in her tapestry series "Latine/x Farmworkers in the US," creates portraits of agricultural laborers with handmade paper, contrasting them with ornate textile frames that signify the poetic life cycle of the crops themselves.

Language emerges as a key element in Heirloom. Ethel Shipton and Ricky Armendariz, from the US-Mexico border towns of Laredo and El Paso, respectively, explore how inherited language evolves and informs culture. Armendariz explains how literature, tejano, conjunto, and country music inform his work: “A lot of the themes are about lost or unrequited love, loss of life and property.” Armendariz uses these themes and song lyrics as titles to his work, and, in the case of Your Wild Garden, he carves into a painting on birch wood with the words “Your Wild Garden is Where I Choose to Live, mas y mas y mas.” Shipton uses text as a conceptual anchor in her work, incorporating Spanglish phrases that reflect the linguistic hybridity of a borderland identity. As co-curator Yadira Silva states, “Her choice of words is familiar and fractured, capturing the fluidity of cultural belonging with the intimate, everyday poetry of bilingual experience.”

Throughout the exhibition, artists map domestic objects in a way that serves as a visual ethnography. Artists explore the emotional weight of domestic items - doormats, irons, and household cleaners- and examine how they carry familial and cultural memory. Katie Pell’s Natural Iron is a personal declaration, reimagining the role of a housewife and creating a parallel universe in which women spend their disposable income on customizing domestic items, such as toasters, washing machines, and irons, rather than the male-dominated hobby of car customization. In Chuck Ramirez's Abuela's Kitchen, Ramirez documented his grandmother’s kitchen to reimagine a type of still life. The inside of her fridge, a busy stovetop, food containers, the artist captures warm, fleeting moments of what he would consider the heart of a home, honoring the relationship with his grandmother.