Yvette Mayorga’s exhibition at the Zapopan Art Museum, in Guadalajara, returns her to the place where her family left and about which she always talks. Throughout his career, he has made art about his family’s journey from the Mexican state of Jalisco to Chicago, exploring the difficulties of his immigrant parents gaining a foothold economically in the United States, beginning in the 1970s. Mayorga, by 33 years old, also looks at how first-generation Americans like her resolve their cultural identities.
Mayorga’s signature method involves applying acrylic paint to the canvas with a piping bag, tracing thick, frilly lines reminiscent of the frosting on elegant wedding and birthday cakes popular in Mexico and Mexican-American communities. The technique recognizes cross-border connections while honoring the physical labor of many immigrants when they arrive in the United States.
The Guadalajara exhibition, Mayorga’s first international solo exhibition, is titled The Golden Cage, a term intended to be a metaphor for the false promises of immigration. Curated by Maya Renée Escárcega, it features paintings inspired by family photos, as well as clay pieces made during a recent residency at the city’s famous Cerámica Suro factory.
The museum is bathed in bright pink, including its façade and interior walls, which were custom colored for the occasion. The centerpiece of the exhibition, a pink 1974 Datsun van, was purchased online and decorated by Mayorga in her flowery style, and symbolizes the mobility of immigrant families like the artist’s.
Below are edited excerpts from a recent video interview with Mayorga, who was in Chicago. This conversation was translated from English to Spanish.
How do you do all those layers of ornamental paint?
I use acrylic paint and an acrylic medium which makes it a little denser. Then I mix it with the color I’m working with and put it in a pastry bag. It’s almost as if I draw with it and draw lines from the paint itself, as a guide to know where I’m going to fill in and have more relief, and then I can go back and forth in those areas. And then it dries. That’s why I usually work on four pieces at a time, because while one piece dries, I then do it with the others.
Do you use a real piping bag?
Yes. The ones I like the most are the ones that bakers use to make a border around a cake. My second favorite is the one that makes a texture that looks like grass.
All of this allows me to have this type of metaphor in my work, to talk about the American dream, and also to talk about work in my family, specifically. I wanted to focus on the jobs my parents did when they came here. My mother worked in a department store bakery for, I think, 20 years. I also thought about gendered work and wanted to explore it more in my practice. It’s not just about my mother. I bring it to the forefront to talk about our contribution in general, and also to criticize and question these gender roles.
Your work is hyperfeminine, everything is pink and ruffled, there are flowers and fashion, and in the self-portrait you show, you have exaggerated makeup, nails and eyelashes.
Definitely, for me feminine art has become a powerful tool in my work. This approach is, to a large extent, a proclamation from myself, that these works are made by me. I place myself within this structure and the history of art, and the idea that men dominate these types of portraits and these types of positions. It seems radical to me that I can affirm this power with nails like this or with false eyelashes.
You have exhibited solo in the United States, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and at the Momentary in Crystal Bridges; this is different. Your parents are from Jalisco, how did that emotional connection influence this exhibition?
Mexican-American artists do not usually have the opportunity to exhibit our work in Mexico, which has a lot to do with being Latinx in the United States. I thought about those things, and what excited me most was the fact that it’s my parents’ home state, and I spent a lot of time there growing up, until I was about 18. We spent every summer there, and I actually went to school in Zacatecas in third grade. I think spending time there contributed to me becoming an artist.
You know the region well. It is the starting point of your art…
For me it was very important to talk about my experience of returning. I don’t necessarily see it from the point of view of being from this place, but of being close to this place, of feeling that this place is somehow my home too. Being in Chicago, doing this work for the last 10 years, I was very curious about how it was going to be received, what kind of conversations were going to arise. I thought that perhaps some of the works would not be understood in the same way, but in reality it was quite the opposite. I think the work was very well received.
There is a clear baroque influence in the exhibition. It is so excessive and indulgent, like those colonial churches of Mexico. There’s a bit of bad taste, isn’t there?
I think that by spending so much time in Mexico, during the summers of my adolescence, I was surrounded by too much baroque architecture. I spent a lot of time inside Catholic churches. Spending time with this architecture shaped my taste because, to me, it wasn’t just a church, I also saw all the paintings inside the church, the gilded edges. I wondered why those paintings were there, why the churches were done in that, you know, decadent way.
By researching colonialism and relating it to art history, I began to map the obvious repercussions of colonialism on my family lineage, which I can also relate to migration and how we ended up here. And I can also relate it to the way we include this kind of festive decadence in our birthdays and weddings. For me, Rococo is a perfect way to refer to the American dream.
​You plant contemporary symbols of American pop culture in your paintings; I recognized Tweety, Hello Kitty. One of the paintings is set in a McDonald’s restaurant.
It’s a photo of me, my sister and my niece inside a McDonald’s. It was something that was very familiar to me and that is part of the first generation of America. In the 90s, for my family, McDonald’s was the most luxurious place you could eat on a Sunday. If we got there we didn’t miss anything. If we went, we felt like everything was fine, and at the same time we felt very American.
What is your next project?
I’m working on a large-scale public art project with Times Square Arts for Fall 2025. And I’m also preparing my first solo exhibition since 2017 in Chicago, this June at Monique Meloche Gallery.
