Biography

Teresa Diaz is an artist and visual arts curator who is a recent immigrant to the Southern California area from Washington DC. Diaz was born and raised in Mexico, D.F. where her father, an artist by profession, and her mother, a trained photographer who studied under the Lola Alvarez Bravo school and the Club Fotografico de Mexico, guided her with drawing and painting techniques at a very early age. She later received her art training at La Academia Goya, a conservative realist art academy lead by Dr. Atl’s pupil Maestro Duarte.

Diaz migrated to the United States to begin her formal studies in fine arts at the University of North Texas’ Visual Art School. In 1993, she won the National Scholarship Award Competition to continue her BFA at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY for her inventive fashion designs and illustrations.   After graduating, she was chosen to work as a summer assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Collection. Inspired by the interaction between art and its audience and the possibilities within the museum setting, she later attained a Masters in Art degree in Museum Studies from the George Washington University.

In Washington, DC she worked for several museums at the Smithsonian Institution, and later, after a brief period in Fresno, California as the Chief Curator for the Fresno Metropolitan Museum, returned as a collections consultant to work for renowned Washington artist Sam Gilliam. Presently, she is the Assistant Collections Manager at the Fowler Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In addition to her professional career, she has continued to work on her series P.S. Wish You Were Here –her most recent project. Her website www.latinovisualsource.com shows links of past and present projects she has been involved in as a curator of Latino art in Washington, D.C., and samples of her own artwork and art writing.

Artist Statement

As a curator I have preferred exploring artists who conveyed powerful messages of identity, cultural roles, sociopolitical metaphors, and allegorical discourses in their work.  As a result, my work has been inspired by these artists and by my own self-exploration, life experience, and analysis of the current state of my surroundings.  Thus, my most recent project evolved into a series of artworks with the intention of exhibiting them together.

P.S. Wish You Were Here, my most recent series, stemmed from my zeal for seclusion and a greater focus on the landscape around me. While on the road in the U.S and Mexico, I became distinctively aware of concepts of distance, speed, isolation, landscape fluctuations, weather phenomena, and the passing of time. Documenting scenes through writing and photographs taken from the interior of the auto while in motion, I explored my own perspectives on conceptual ideas such as the eternal, permanence, existence, and migration. Some of these photographs were then translated into a series of studies using drawing and collage, which I later rendered in oil paint on large canvases

In addition to 10 paintings, four large-scale digital prints and two videos and a 3-D installation are included as part of P.S. Wish You Were Here. The result is a cohesive installation project composed of 15 paintings, drawings, photographs and a video to fit in a separate, site specific installation that portrays several dream-like landscape scenes seen through the perspective of a path, road or highway during various times of the day. The first in the series, Roadscape #1, an 84’x 48’ oil painting on canvas depicting a one-lane highway amid sandstone boulders, monoliths, dunes, and a continuing road in the canyon-like horizon, served as an inspiration for the remaining 14 works.

Aesthetically speaking, my intent is to juxtapose different textures and dramatic perspectives of the road against the majestic landscape to give the viewer a refreshing awareness of the intricacy of the landscape’s character beyond man-made structures and boundaries.  Through these, my fascination with the expansion of land replete with wonder, adventure and greatness is conveyed by the attention to detail in rendering the sky, the earth and the road itself. At a glance, it seems like staring at a timeless moment that could become hastily short-lived by the inability to grasp the images’ speed, entrance and departure, convergence and divergence, presence and absence, inclusiveness and elimination swiftly. Nonetheless, the challenge for the viewer is to capture the scenery in one raw interval of time.

In keeping with the conceptual idea of existence, my interest is not only to depict an aesthetically pleasing composition, but to bring awareness to other factors such as the wilderness as a foreign destination defined by boundaries that are “protected” by the state and altered and penetrated by byways and roads, and, the idea that nature is, for the most part, only accessible and appreciated from within the comfort of a confined commodity and through simulated portals to nature called “lookouts.” The installation invites reflection of our own existence and perceptions and challenges the viewer’s self-evident truths.

 On view at Artomatic 2008 May 9 - June 14, 2008

For more information, check out www.artomatic.org.