Changarrito Residency: Citlali Delgado

About the Artist

Citlali Delgado is a Chicana visual artist from El Paso, Texas with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from New Mexico State University. Based in the borderlands, her paintings function to understand how she and her communities can live with, against, and past the border. She attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art residency program and has work in the Eastern New Mexico University and the New Mexico State University Museum permanent collections. She has exhibited at the El Paso Museum of Art Border Biennial, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez Bienal Fronteriza, and the Ecos del Sol exhibition at the Museum of the Big Bend.

Artist Statement

My figurative paintings are ever reframing my testimonies as a Chicana in search of grieving and growth. Always concerned with the U.S./Mexico borderlands as I grew up in El Paso, Texas, my understanding of regional complexity is always in orbit. When I create, I am reevaluating the many nuances and fantasies others have of the desert, of Mexico, and of the border but sometimes, I find certain fantasies to be of my own emergence. The land I belong to is to be respected for its history and then critically maintained through decolonizing, grieving, and healing. I think about my site-specific presence as a maker, exhibitor, and institutional participant on top of my brownness through themes of politics of representation, tokenization, and erasure. Trying to take care of the people I paint knowing the artistic agency my work does and does not have, I am to uncover ways in which my communities and I can live with, against, and past the border.