Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: All That Before Us: New York

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: All That Before Us, a two-person exhibition at our New York City 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 the exhibition, we join museums, artists, and organizations nationwide in celebrating craft traditions that connect us across history and time.  

As a vital motif in the work of Jiménez Underwood, the rebozo transcends its pre-colonial origins to capture contemporary culture. Far more than a simple shawl, it serves as a historical record of memory and culture, woven into threadwork. In her Rebozos Fleeing series, Jimenez Underwood creates rebozos that pay homage to nature, often incorporating hues that resemble sunsets or rainstorms. The black checkered pattern at the top of the compositions represents the most valuable knowledge that Jimenez Underwood would like to take with her into the afterlife: her knowledge to weave a rebozo. 

Jimenez Underwood’s Galactic Detention Center series presents unique interpretations of constellation maps woven with steel and aluminum barbed wire and metallic thread. These pieces capture a celestial glow and evoke the presence of stars and cosmic matter. This series discusses the young people in juvenile detention and those now being held in immigration detention centers. Imagining these centers in a cosmic context brings to mind their arbitrary nature, indeed, their ridiculousness, for what is a human system of documentation compared to the universal scale of life?

“Girl Fight is not a sensationalized and raucous brawl between two young women in the school yard but the internal fight that happens with oneself.” - Jennifer Ling Datchuk

Datchuk created this work in the final weeks of her pregnancy and early postpartum, a moment in which she emerged from a former version of herself, feeling alien in the midst of this transition. The two white porcelain pots draw inspiration from the ancient Chinese Song dynasty and are incised with historical, personal, and collective blue imagery, including fertility figurines, aliens, bobby pins, maternal DNA structures, pregnancy tests, and combs. Sprouting from these pots is a knot of intertwined curly and straight Asian human hair. This convergence of texture and symbolism arises from an exploration of the complex and deeply personal nature of dualities.

Dachuk’s series my neck, my back, speaks to growth and transformation: fruits and

vegetables maturing for harvest, physiological and emotional changes that women and children undergo simultaneously during pregnancy. From seed to soil, infertility to fertility, from the ways we carry life to the labor and care that follow. Cast from an antique Chinese ceramic pillow—once used to preserve elaborate hairstyles through the night—these porcelain baby forms evoke the quiet labor that props up wealth and status. Reimagined here, they bear the weight of Asian women’s work, smiling as they kneel, backs burdened. In the same vain, Working 9 to Forever, cast from a 70s or 80s hobby mold, a stereotype figurine of a Chinese girl with her bob haircut and bands, rice picker hat, heavy shoulder yoke across her back, dragon on her qipao, barefoot. She rests atop broken ceramic shards, continuing her work. Jennifer Ling Datchuk asks us to consider the cost of women’s labor in our everyday lives- how labor is defined when it is unpaid, invisible, and done in silence.

On Demand references the artist’s personal postpartum experience with breastfeeding, while also commenting on breastfeeding in contemporary society. Datchuk explains, “Breastfeeding is unpaid gendered labor in which womxn suffer economic, mental, physical, emotional, and political exhaustion. As a woman navigating the reproductive complex for over a decade–from endometriosis and infertility to pregnancy and postpartum–and as an artist questioning both the policing of women’s bodies in our society and the value placed on our labor in the global economy, I see women as the source of everything, yet witness how systems fail to support us.”

Ripening and Becoming are inspired by an anatomical Venus sculpture reclined on a bench from mainland China. Made from bone and mahogany, the figurine is believed to be historically used by women in medical visits with male doctors, allowing them to indicate areas of pain while maintaining modesty. In these works, Datchuk transforms that history into a meditation on dualities. Her pregnant body reclines on an enlarged replica of the bench, her scarred skin forming a fertile landscape. Postpartum, she shares the bench with her baby, hovering as she nurses. Yet regardless of what women have attempted to reclaim, they still move between choices dictated by narratives they did not create.  

The granddaughter of factory workers, her Irish American grandmother was just one of a handful of women who worked the assembly line of a car manufacturing plant, and her Chinese grandmother worked in a sewing factory, located deep within the alleys of a Chinatown, for an American retailer. About these megaphone sculptures, Datchuk states, "I was taught at a very early age to 'eat bitterness' – the Chinese idiom that describes enduring hardships without complaint, to suffer in silence, to obey, and ultimately to remain in submission. No matter how empowered we feel, or how much we attempt to reclaim, women still find themselves navigating choices dictated by narratives we did not create. Deep within my DNA, and in the muscle memory of the assembly line, I carry my grandmothers' hopes and tell the stories of how their labor helped build what was once stamped 'Made in America."