NADA Miami 2022

Through a combination of hand-sewn textiles and paints, Maria A. Guzmán Capron joins together an array of patterns and striking colors to fashion bodily forms. Exploring cultural hybridity, pride, and the competing desires to assimilate and to be seen, her multilayered fiber works emphasize that we consist of several identities, some that we repress and some that we exalt.

Composed with a variety of recycled, off-cut, and store-bought fabrics, Capron’s practice explores how clothing is used as a marker of class, gender, and cultural identity in a homogenizing capitalist landscape. Drawing from immigrants’ experiences, she is invested in the friction of mistranslations—of failing to “dress the part,″ or having one’s pride in self-expression overcast by exoticization or coercive assimilation.

Signature moves in Capron’s work, such as exaggerated body parts, render muscular arms that embrace, puffy fingers that clasp together, and slinky legs that intertwine to become one. Through eclectic fabric and subtly painted brushstrokes, these interlaced figures confront the viewer and become an invitation for vulnerability, openness, and individual expression.

Maria A. Guzmán Capron (b. 1981, Milan, Italy; Lives and works in Oakland, CA) was born in Italy to Columbian and Peruvian parents. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2015 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2004. Solo exhibitions include the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Texas State Galleries, San Marcos, TX; Premier Junior, San Francisco, CA; Roll Up Project, Oakland, CA; and Guerrero Gallery San Francisco, CA. Select group exhibitions include Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA; CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA; Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY; Deli Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and Mana Contemporary in Chicago, IL. Her works have been written about in Hyperallergic, Variable West, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America.

Capron is the 2022 recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Award and will have a forthcoming exhibition, Respira Hondo, at SFMOMA in December 2022.