PLAYA VISTA, CA.- Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery this fall features Sonia Romero in a twenty-plus-year survey exhibition that celebrates her enduring and boundary-pushing art practice that addresses issues of social, cultural and political significance, and her important contributions to the Los Angeles art landscape as the creator of multiple permanent public artworks. Sonia Romero: Taken Root includes more than 50 pieces spanning the early 2000s to the present, celebrating the artist’s signature visual language that has always and already expanded the possibilities of the mediums of printmaking, painting and papercutting.
Romero, born in Los Angeles in 1980, exemplifies the identity and lived experience of a “both/and” artist. Describing herself as “half Hispanic/Mexican American” and “half German/Russian American,” she has cultivated her own artistic path that synthesizes her Chicano heritage traced through her father’s side (her father is artist Frank Romero) along with her Ashkenazi Jewish matrilineal line influenced by her grandmother, artist and art collector Edith Wylie—who was founder of Los Angeles’s Craft and Folk Art Museum—as well as her mother Nancy Romero, also a visual artist. Proclaiming herself as an artist since childhood, Sonia Romero’s multi-ethnic upbringing has been formative to her development of her individual expression that transcends categories of belonging as well as art making.
The exhibition Taken Root considers how Romero, known for her methodical, and sometimes playful, art-making processes, blurs distinctions between the mediums of painting and printmaking, creating varied and complex artworks that belie a mere surface reading. The artwork she produces—painted and collaged canvases, monoprints, linocuts and silkscreens as well as hand-painted tiles, embossed ceramics and laser-cut steel forms—could be best described as materially and technically intertwined. Calling herself a painter first who studied all modes of printmaking as an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, it was her post-grad year-long tutelage under graphic artist Artemio Rodriguez at Self Help Graphics and Art in Los Angeles that set her on a trajectory of mixing media. Her mastery of the linocut and its limitless possibilities of repetition, pattern and bold graphic qualities blossomed into an ever-evolving signature style in which prints merge within a painting, the linocut begets a paper cut, the papercut becomes the model for a painting, and so on.
One of the hallmarks of Romero’s practice is her commitment to making her artwork as accessible as possible—legible to the widest potential audience—thereby carrying the torch of important Mexican and Chicanx artistic forebears. Her desire to connect her artwork with broad audiences is most pronounced in the more than ten permanent public art commissions she has completed across southern California. This exhibition will highlight five public artworks that illustrate her process: how she finds inspiration in narratives gleaned through research and community engagement and pushes herself to develop new working and material strategies that further her artistic vision.
Loyola Marymount University
Sonia Romero: Taken Root
September 23rd, 2023 – December 9th, 2023
