Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: In Our Hands

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: In Our Hands, a two-person exhibition at our San Antonio gallery. Employing time-honored craft techniques and materials, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood create work that uniquely balances fine art and technical skill. Their practice explores compelling themes such as migration, gender equality, and multicultural identity. Ruiz-Healy Art is proud to participate in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide initiative led by Craft in America to honor the handmade during America’s Semiquincentennial. Through both exhibitions, we join museums, artists, and organizations nationwide in celebrating craft traditions that connect us across history and time.  

Rooted in intergenerational empowerment, lineage, and a shared reverence for materials, the unique connection between Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood underpins this exhibition. Datchuk presents a collection of ceramics, sculptures, and photographs that invite viewers to look more closely at the frameworks surrounding the female and the labored body. Simultaneously, Jimenez Underwood presents a body of work that utilizes textile and sculptural components to explore and challenge systems that have built both human division and connection. Together, they work to dismantle the hierarchy of material and champion the handmade, essential to the shared artistic language of the artists.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood is the daughter of migrant agricultural workers, a Chicana mother and a father of Huichol Indigenous descent. Her work reflects personal borderland experiences and depicts the world through her tri-cultural lens. Utilizing textile and mixed media, her work Free Falling Flag explores the complexities of a physical and geopolitical border, demonstrating how nations can be divided yet remain inextricably connected. The artwork showcases woven interpretations of the United States and Mexican flags, joined by a string of safety pins—a recurring element in the artist’s oeuvre that symbolizes a tether between both countries. Below the safety pins is another flag: a white background with a brown circle of barbed wire, a frequent motif of division. Reflecting the perspective of living in the borderlands, Jimenez Underwood observes that "flags become similar, blurred, often both nations seem the same," capturing the nuanced reality of the frontier.

Jennifer Ling Datchuk's work explores the societal, cultural, and political systems women navigate through porcelain, adornment, blue-and-white patterns, reflective surfaces, and synthetic and human hair through installation, objects, and video. In juxtaposition, her pieces explore how relegation to the domestic, mother-sphere annihilates the innocence of girlhood and locks women into a controlled space of servitude. Datchuk uses race as a lens to narrow her demonstration of the circles Asian women in particular are allowed to operate within. Her work For Your Eyes Only is inspired by red velvet curtains on a stage that separate performer and audience; Datchuk's curtains consider metaphorical thresholds of girlhood to womanhood, of being a woman and entering all-male spaces, and being a person of color in all-white spaces.  Porcelain hands with acrylic manicures hold a peach, a chicken foot, and a Venus of Willendorf reproduction, capturing the tension between the power to give and receive pleasure. Regarding her philosophy, Datchuk expresses, “In many ways we have more things in common than we have differences. I think one artwork will not change the world, and one artist might not, but collectively we can.”

Throughout the exhibition, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood reimagine traditional materials and time-honored forms, bridging gaps between the ancestral and the contemporary, exploring systems of power, and the nuances of identities within those systems. In Our Hands serves as a call to action, inviting viewers to consider time, histories, and how we can shape the future.