(Santa Fe, NM) The New Mexico-based Latinx artist confronts sexism and explores the complex female experience with artwork made from her hair collected over the course of two decades.
(June 2024) For the past 22 years, New Mexico-based artist Rosemary Meza-DesPlas has diligently collected, preserved, and created provocative art with her hair, culminating in what is now the most comprehensive intersectional feminist exploration of gender inequality, political agency, and cultural misunderstandings through bodily ephemera in existence. The exhibition opens with a reception at form & concept on Friday, June 28, from 5-7 p.m.
Rosemary Meza-DesPlas’ retrospective is a decades-long, interdisciplinary endeavor. My hair story: from brunette to greypresents a comprehensive exploration of the artist’s ongoing practice of engaging with hair, examining the cultural meaning and symbolism of the thin strands of hardened protein that sprout from our heads. While other artists have experimented with the use of hair in their artwork, notably Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum, Krystyna Piotrowska, and Isabelle Plat, Meza-DesPlas is the first to use hair in an in-depth exploration of Latinx identity. Meza-DesPlas begins this exploration with works that focus on and challenge the historical representation of women in Western art. From this starting point, Meza-DesPlas embarks on a painstaking investigation of the social norms and cultural pressures that influence the experiences of women of color.
Drawing on personal experiences and decades of academic research, this retrospective covers everything from marriage and female intimacy to the sexualization of Latin American women’s bodies and the relationship between sex, violence and women in popular media, offering viewers one of the most vivid contemporary depictions of the contradictory but often coexisting stereotypes attributed to women.
“Meza-DesPlas’ works are refreshingly defiant,” says Spencer Linford, communications director at Form & Concept. “They don’t pander to polite sensibilities. They are open, raw and unapologetically human. Meza-DesPlas’ subjects are not the idealized figures of art history. They are figures who bear the physical and psychological scars of being bound to a fetishized and idealized body. They are real, as real as the hair they are made of.”
Meza-DesPlas’ studio practice draws on the women’s craft movement of the 1970s, which focused on destigmatizing and recognizing women’s domestic labor. In terms of medium, technical approach, and ethos, My Hair Story picks up where the movement left off, illuminating invisible realities and bringing the uncomfortable experiences of living as a woman in a patriarchal society into focus.
Rosemary Meza-DesPlas is a multidisciplinary Latin American artist incorporating textile art, drawing, installation, painting, performance art, and video into her studio practice, exploring sociocultural issues, gender pressures, political agency, and ethnic stereotypes from an intersectional feminist perspective.
The human figure is central to Meza-DesPlas’ work. Her artworks amplify women’s voices and reflect women’s experiences in a patriarchal society. The tenacity of her eight aunts in the face of personal tragedy and adversity was an early inspiration. Their stories contributed to her turning to feminist ideology. Thematic continuity connects Meza-DesPlas’ visual artworks with her academic writings and poetry, which provide a foundation for her performance art.
In 2022, she was awarded a Latinx Artist Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. She received a 2022 Fulcrum Fund grant to create and perform a new performance art piece titled Miss Nalgas USA 2022. Meza-DesPlas will be featured in the 2024 book Aquí&Allá, Conversations with Creators from México and the USA; this two-volume set, funded by the Mexican government’s Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales grant, features interviews with 20 internationally recognized artists. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Sonoma County, 516 ARTS, New Mexico Museum of Art, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Spartanburg Art Museum, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Koehnline Museum of Art. She holds a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
