Changarrito Residency: Lorena Diosdado

About the Artist

Lorena Diosdado is an artist currently working in Texas and California, whose practice engages with the sociopolitical history of Latinxs in the U.S., the aesthetics of excess, and the politics of visibility. Her expressive paintings and drawings explore the intersections of family, memory, and place, deeply informed by Chicana feminist thought and the personal histories that shape cultural identity. Diosdado earned her B.A. in Art Practice with Honors and a minor in Education from Stanford University and is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting & Drawing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum of Art, Coulter Art Gallery, The Stanford Art Gallery, the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Ox-bow School of Art, and 6th Street Studios and Art Center where she also served as the artist-in-residence. She has received numerous accolades, including the Chappell Lougee Fellowship at Stanford University, the Raina Gese Award in Painting, and the Carolyn Kay Davis Centennial Memorial Award. Her work has been featured in Tlamatini, an independent Chicana publication and New American Paintings.

Artist Statement

“My work honors dreaming and hoping as acts of survival essential to the processes of living and healing. Shaped by experiences of transnationality, my practice combines intuitive digital and analog collage to construct allegorical paintings and drawings that explore the complexities of identity. My work fabulates a world within folklore/childlore, in which people’s relationship to their environments is in a perpetual state of reconstruction. Drawn to fragmentation, reconstruction and reframing as both conceptual and visual tools, my work layers family photos, memories and painful events through improvisational direct application, scratching, covering and unearthing.

Duality of place and identity shapes my central inquiry; how stories people tell about themselves, their challenges, their environments, weaves in and out of what they know and experience in the present and what they imagine or hope for in the future. Drawing from queer Chicana feminism that reimagines traditional Mexican domestic and public life, I attempt to investigate the ways in which we self-actualize based on myths, the experience of girlhood/womanhood, and personal/collective memory. I excavate moments from the past, especially those that haunt us, with an aim to tell a much larger story about and for low-income Latinxs on the periphery of America.”