“The Devil’s Daughter Is Getting Married is a sampled fragment of a Cuban folkloric idiom I often heard my parents tell me while growing up. “When the sun is shining and it’s raining, the Devil’s daughter is getting married.” It is one of many folk idioms describing a sun-shower.

It being a folk idiom is of less interest to me, rather that it describes conflicting conditions necessary of a sun- shower (and subsequent rainbow) –the rainbow appears when opposite forces meet – refraction of light through rain clouds.  This reminds me that all conditions are impermanent but a positive outcome can come from an otherwise dire condition.  Where opposing forces meet, the rainbow appears and forms an edge.  These are bright and hopeful works, through the complications, they are beautiful yet they are simple.”

Optimistic artwork for complicated times

“By what means and what way do I measure a life lived? Not by a category or a milestone, but the time spent in between. The quotidian moments that, slowly compiled over time make a life. These are paintings measuring decades.  Small moments, multiplied over years, folded into a single abstraction, holding time and recording its passage.

These paintings are collaged, pieced, dyed, and stitched as a reconsideration of the field and form. Constructed in parts from hand-dyed canvas & upcycled textiles -including handsewn cutter-quilts, US Army blankets, wool jackets, suits, & dresses -all deconstructed, flattened, & stitched by hand unto raw canvas. They began as uneventful drawings made without thinking much of why. The paintings emerged from these drawings, as their own outcome.

These paintings have their own outcomes, regardless of my intent. They are decades and cross-generational. Floating through aesthetics and genre-less. Let the outcomes be unknown.

They need a lot of room.  I am most interested in how they hold space and are looked at slowly. They are slow-blooming pieces, meant to unfold over a long time. The immediacy of the found materials are countered by the slow delicacy of making, balance of composition, and how the colors and shapes reveal themselves over time.

My studio practice engages material making that is meaningful. I consider craft a form of consciousness, and the decorative has work to do. Materiality is a meaning that is distinctive. I don’t question the materiality – it is implicit.

The work moves past disciplinary categorization to ask poetic questions about our life and times. I try to live the life I am making in the work and let my experiences as an artist lead me to new ways of seeing the world. My art asks questions, like poems, such as ‘Is a rainbow a picture?’, ‘Can symbols devour us?’ and’Can slowness blossom?’ Titles are used to point to the feeling, time, & place while leaving them open to interpretation.”

How hybridity in my studio practice relates to my lived-experience

“As a Latinx artist, hybridity was a learned experience while growing up. My Cuban immigrant parents taught me hand-work, material re-use, and improvisational “making-do”. A strategy to use and reuse material objects with a sustainable mindset based on an economic priority. The ethos has defined my studio practice for many years. Making the most with the least (small footprint, low-waste, low-impact, and fully supportive labor assistant practices).

My parents understood the need to balance the decorative with the utilitarian to resist subjugation and to build a world they wanted to live in. My mother, a professor of Spanish literature and an American Quilter’s Society multiple award winner, taught me how to sew. My father, an inventor and mechanical engineer, designed prototypes in his wood & metals workshop in our basement, and taught me how to build.

Exile was bewildering to my parents who practiced making objects and code-switching while I learned how to pass. I understand that consciously crafted objects will contain multitudes, hold ideas, and mark time & space.

As a young artist growing up in the 1970’s & 80’s, I was influenced by Modernism and the Arts & Crafts Movement. In my practice, I have deep appreciation for Modernist & Medieval painting. Having been educated in art in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. I have long been interested in collage-based painting that expand the field and challenge categories – such as the Pattern & Decoration movement, and artists who used craft & collage methods to challenge categorization of art, craft & design such as Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Sister Corita Kent, The Eames, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Blinky Palermo, Robert Kushner. So much work has been done, yet in 2020, we are still unpacking the legacies of Modernism and the implicit biases of maker and object. Hence, why I believe the decorative still has work to do.”

– Diana, March 2020.