Untitled (figures)

Maria de los Angeles

Two groups of nude figures divide this powerful, untitled composition by Maria de los Angeles, separated by the actions of a man in the center of the work. To the left, a crowd of kneeling women surrounds a woman with a paper bag over her head; above her, a man stands with a gun pointed at the bag as, in the far left, cloaked Death looks on. To the right is a group of figures in a cage of sorts, unable to help, embracing each other out of fear or grief. Some appear to lack their full limbs; some have no heads.

De los Angeles uses loose, sketched linework on the plate by employing soft-ground techniques, obscuring the composition just enough to require the viewer to peer closer and discover the truth - and the questions - that arise from the plate.

Maria de Los Angeles was born in 1988 in Michoacán, Mexico, the eldest of eight children, and “immigrated” to Santa Rosa, California in 2000 with her family. The first in her family to attend college, De Los Angeles graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in Fine Arts from Santa Rosa Junior College in 2010, a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 2013.

Hundreds of paintings, drawings and hard-earned arts supplies were lost in a campus fire at Pratt Institute just weeks before her thesis presentation and her graduate school interview at Yale, works that were necessary for both.

“To get an interview to Yale is a big deal,” she said. “You have to do your best because you may not get another chance. That’s how hard it is. I lost everything, all the work I prepared for my thesis and for the interview at Yale.” De Los Angeles pushed through and completed a new body of work that helped her graduate in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Pratt in Brooklyn, and earned her a highly competitive spot in Yale’s art program. She graduated with an MFA from Yale in May of 2015 and received Yale’s Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, a $10,000 award presented to a promising artist.

De los Angeles has taught as a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute. As a “Dreamer” she has felt she had to be an activist for immigrants. When Pratt invited her to teach a course in Italy, “giving her the opportunity to see the murals of Tintoretto in Venice, as well as the whole sweep of Italian Renaissance Art. The huge floating figures of Chagall in Lincoln Center also inspired her, as well as Siqueiros, the most radical of the Mexican muralists, who successfully paired radical politics with experimental media.”