Brenda Melgoza Ciardiello

ARTIST BIO

Brenda is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator born in Mexico City. Incorporating painting, ceramic sculpture, and elements of the photographic, she describes her visual work as a manifested yearning to propagate roots, to cultivate connection and indigeneity through engagements with the natural world and memory. Mostly raised in Texas, she has also lived / studied in Italy, the U.K., New York City, New England, the Rocky Mountains and the Middle East. She has shown her work nationally and internationally and has recently attended residencies in Greece, Maine, and Wyoming.

Brenda currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and three sons where she shows, teaches, and maintains a regular artistic practice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Classical Civilizations from the University of Notre Dame, a Master of Science in Education from The City College of New York, and an MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She was a 2021 Carter Community Artist with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am an interdisciplinary artist born in Mexico City and based in Texas. Displacement and migration have fundamentally shaped my perspective. Rooted in both indigenous Mesoamerican craft and European art historical traditions of landscape, still life, and portraiture, my practice, like me, exists in the in-between of two identities forced to co-exist. In my work, I document and seek to understand how our identities, especially for displaced people, are informed by our connections and disconnections to place.

My current work revolves around material and site-specificity: an inquiry into our nostalgic attachments to place. I am interested in how I can extend contact with a place and its private associations by incorporating that place into objects with which we live day to day. I forage site-specific wild clay, minerals, rocks, and sand from places with personal meaning to me (Mexico, Maine, Texas, Greece, to name a few) to create ceramic sculpture and paintings. Primarily metaphorical self-portraits — a nod to how we are an accumulation of all the places we have been and all the things we have seen — the objects are also multicultural hybrids: souvenir-talisman-milagros which conjure specific memories and connections to place, making the intangible tangible when seen or, ideally, touched.

Through these intentional engagements with memory and the natural world, I blur the line between the self and nature, allowing displaced plants, landscapes, and fruits to become protagonists with complex histories, cultures, and attachments that inevitably begin to mirror our own.

All works will be available for pickup and will begin to ship two weeks after the show closes