Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: In Our Hands: San Antonio

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 the exhibition, we join museums, artists, and organizations nationwide in celebrating craft traditions that connect us across history and time.  

Utilizing aluminum wire, safety pins, and beads, Jimenez Underwood's Wired Nopales and Wondering in Circles feature green colorfields adorned with gold circles, Indigenous nopales, and oscillating lines, formed by aluminum wire assembled into barbs. Shapes featured are recurring motifs in the artist's body of work, symbolizing geopolitical borders that violently disrupt human freedom and the migration of flora and fauna. Nopales were a staple for Jimenez Underwood growing up: the cactus served as food, medicine, and a dye mordant. Cacti can survive intense fire, remaining intact and in place, a metaphor of strength and resilience for the artist.

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?

In her Relics Remembered #1 and Relics Remembered #2, Jimenez Underwood emphasizes deeply personal, evocative iconography, incorporating imagery such as the Virgen de Guadalupe and 1990s California/Mexico border signage. The highway sign design echoes the style of a deer-crossing sign, a striking comparison that led the artist to observe, "they're thinking of us as animals now."

In Are You Even Trying, Datchuk creates an acrylic pregnancy test, outlined in blue neon, with the test window highlighted in red neon. In place of two lines within this red circle, Datchuk crafted two replications of the Venus of Willendorf, a prehistoric sculpture of a woman's body excavated in Austria. It has been speculated that thirty thousand years ago this “Venus” had been a representation of a fertility figure, a mother goddess, or even an aphrodisiac made by and for men. Datchuk explains, “This idea came to me while zoned out on a drive home from teaching all day. The best part of my creative brain was zapped by helping students navigate their conceptual projects. I kept asking myself, “Are you even trying...to make work right now?"

my neck, my back are porcelain baby forms cast from an antique Chinese export ware ceramic pillow form – made to prop up the head to protect female hairstyles during sleep. And yet, rather than hold up the heads of resting women, these figures carry an assortment of fruit, chicken feet, and a service bell on their backs. These figures carry the weight of the objects on their elbows and knees, evoking precariousness and tension as they balance the objects on their backs while spinning. Moreover, the pose of the figures implies an inherent subservience to the absent “one” requiring them to perform such work. The pose combines with the title my neck, my back (a reference to the sexually explicit pop song) to remind viewers of both the fetishized and labored expectations that Asian women exist under.

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.  

Jennifer Ling Datchuk considers her megaphone sculptures to be family portraits. The glazed ceramic megaphones are tinted iterations of oyster, almond, and biscuit toilet glazes. Datchuk states, "Some with flecks of colors inspired by the tiny spots found on eggshells, freckles, and stone to mark the fragility, permanence, and hardness of our voices, stories, and experiences."