BERKELEY, CA.- The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will present an exhibition of new work by Griselda Rosas, a San Diego- and Tijuana-based artist whose practice explores themes of identity and migration particularly within the US-Mexico border region. MATRIX 282 / Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido features more than a dozen new artworks by Rosas, centered around two major sculptures that exemplify the artist’s use of organic and found materials. The exhibition marks the latest installment of the museum’s MATRIX Program, a vanguard exhibition series that highlights distinctive and important voices in contemporary art.

The subtitle of the exhibition, Yo te cuido, which translates literally to “I take care of you”, is a phrase that is at once an expression of care and caution. Much of Rosas’s practice is informed by single motherhood, and several works are created in collaboration with her son—whose drawings often serve as the foundation for her colorful mixed-media collages. Using embroidery skills learned from her mother, grandmother, and aunts, Rosas sews and stitches directly onto her drawings, layering fabric and images with watercolor, acrylic, and natural pigment. Themes of inheritance and ancestral knowledge recur throughout these works, alongside motifs of war and invasion that emphasize the artist’s inquiry into histories of colonialism and imagining reparative possibilities for the future.

MATRIX 282 / Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido features two sculptural installations and twelve textile drawings that were created over the past two years. Made from tree branches, cement, and various pigments, Rosas’s sculptures are abstract forms that resemble slingshots. Realized at a dramatically large scale and ornamented with various patterns and textures, Rosas renders this recognizable form using her own formal language. Stretched across and between these sculptures are long bands of rubber, a material made by Indigenous women in Michoacan. As both a weapon and a toy, slingshots echo the interplay between violence and childhood play that appears in Rosas’s textile drawings.

In conjunction with Yo te cuido, Rosas will deliver an artist talk at BAMPFA on Thursday, August 31 at 6 p.m. Attendance is free with gallery admission. This program will be facilitated by BAMPFA’s Senior Curator Anthony Graham, who organized the exhibition’s original presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego before joining BAMPFA earlier this year.

“It’s a pleasure to continue this project with Griselda Rosas, bringing her first solo exhibition to the Bay Area and sharing her rich and singular practice with our audiences,” said Graham. “Griselda’s work illuminates complex histories—social, cultural, and often deeply personal—in forms that are shaped both by deep research and her own experience. While in some ways specific to the US-Mexico border region, Rosas’s work underscores how our visual and material world is shaped by networks of ideas that are constantly circulating, taking on new meanings and associations across time and place.”

“We’re thrilled to partner with Griselda Rosas and our colleagues at MCASD in bringing this important exhibition to Berkeley, where it will advance BAMPFA’s long-standing track record of showcasing the most exciting and forward-thinking voices in contemporary art—especially work from Latinx artists, which has been a growing focus of our curatorial program in recent years,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm. “This exhibition also marks an important step forward in our reimagining of BAMPFA’s iconic MATRIX Program, which is being reinvigorated by the museum’s new curatorial team to ensure that it leads conversations within contemporary art well into the future.”

Griselda Rosas

Born and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Griselda Rosas is a visual artist whose practice encompasses textiles, drawing, and sculpture as she explores themes of cultural hybridity and identity. Working between the US/Mexico border region, her work is guided by her experiences in the binational area. Rosas received a BFA in painting and printmaking and a MFA in sculpture at San Diego State University, where she then taught from 2013 to 2022. Solo exhibitions include Yo te cuido, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2023); Forged Dialect, Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA (2022); and Regata Abscisa, Oceanside Museum of Art, San Diego, CA (2020). Notable group exhibitions include, Stories from My Childhood, Northern Illinois University Art Museum, DeKalb, IL (2022); Cannon Gallery Ninth Invitational exhibition, Carlsbad, CA (2022); First International Festival of Manuports, Kohta, Helsinki, Finland (2021); and San Diego Art Prize Exhibit, Bread & Salt, San Diego, CA (2020); among others.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Griselda Rosas: MATRIX 282 / Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido
August 30th, 2023 - November 19th, 2023