tlisza juarique | artist project

Tlisza Jaurique is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist whose work is prompted by conceptual concerns including change, language, and interpretation/understanding regarding power, nothingness and death. She has a BA in Philosophy and minors in Studio Art and Spanish Literature from Vassar College. She has an MA in Art Education and continued with her doctoral studies in Education at Arizona State University. In 2008, she was the first woman of Mexican American decent to exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She also has had multiple exhibitions at the Smithsnian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian. In 2016 she received the Artists’ Fellowship Grant, NYC. Other venues include the David Rockefeller Center for Latino Studies at Harvard, the Latino Cultural Center at Yale University, the Hispanic Research Center at ASU, the Notre Dame Center for Latino Studies, Taller Puertorriqueno, the Nelson Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia City Hall, Phoenix City Hall, and Tempe City Hall. She lives and works in New Haven and New York City.

Notes from the artist:

As a philosopher, artist, and educator, my work seeks to explore the possibility of new mediums, while continuing inherited and learned aesthetic and cultural practices—ancestral and contemporary. I use my defining aesthetic structures—my indigenous/tribal upbringing and my formal Occidental/American education as mediums in understanding. I have philosophically rooted, conceptual, and linguistic concerns that provide a foundation for the development and execution of my work—the ontological and epistemological concerns of Change, Reflection, Self, Language, and Hermeneutics (understanding and interpretation). My preferred medium is glitter. Glitter addresses concepts of reflection, multiplicity, and change. My paintings and installations are explorations of constructed, temporal, conceptual, sacred space. The constructed space becomes conceptual habitation— bound by borrowed, restricted, temporary, ephemeral, and meaningful space.