Natalia Anciso

Natalia Anciso (born March 25, 1985) is an American Chicana-Tejana contemporary artist and educator. Her artwork focuses primarily on issues involving Identity, especially as it pertains to her experiences growing up along the U.S.-Mexico Border,^[2] via visual art and installation art. Her more recent work covers topics related to human rights and social justice, which is informed by her experience as an urban educator in the San Francisco Bay Area.^[3] She is a native of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.^[4]

Biography

Natalia Anciso was born in Weslaco, Texas in 1985. A fifth-generation Tejana, her family has resided along the Texas Borderlands since the Texas Revolution. Shortly after her birth, Anciso's family moved to Austin, where they would reside until she was the age of 10. She would eventually move back to the Rio Grande Valley to her parents' hometown of Mercedes, Texas, where she would graduate from Mercedes High School in 2003. Coming from a long line of migrant farmworkers and laborers, Anciso is the first in her family to graduate from college.^[5] She earned her B.A. in Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts in 2008, before moving to Oakland, California, where she would earn her Master of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2011.^[6] A Berkeley Distinguished Graduate Fellow, Anciso is currently pursuing her M.A. in Education at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Education.

Work

Art

Anciso creates art predicated on realities and legends of her upbringing. Her works are visual records of family, community, and border culture along her native Rio Grande. Her work has historically covered issues surrounding the Borderlands, which have long been subject to poverty, human trafficking, and the drug war.^[7] She depicts Chicano history and struggles on both sides of the border in her work, especially as it pertains to the notion of Identity.^[8]

Anciso researches vernacular arts like pano arte, handkerchief art believed to have emerged from Chicano prisoners in the 1940s, and the huipil, embroidered Mayan textiles worn by indigenous women in Southern and Central America. These art forms are reconfigured to tell contemporary stories of life along the Texas/Mexico border. Using pen, pencil, and paint on domestic textiles such as handkerchiefs, pillowcases, and bed sheets, Anciso's work examines psycho-political struggles of life along La Frontera. Specific subjects include the lynchings of Mexicans and Tejanos in Texas from the Texas Rangers, as evident in her Pinches Rinches series, which draws from both historical references and stories of her family in the Rio Grande Valley.^[9]

Her most recent work covers issues around education, human rights, class and race, as evident in her piece, "Don't Shoot" (2014), which is featured as the cover of the human rights education book, Bringing Human Rights Education to US Classrooms: Exemplary Models from Elementary Grades to University, published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by University of San Francisco professors, Dr. Susan Roberta Katz and Dr. Andrea McEvoy Spero.^[10]

Anciso's art has been included in exhibitions throughout the country and internationally. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Vincent Price Art Museum of Los Angeles, the Mexic-Arte Museum of Austin, the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago, Centro Cultural de la Raza of San Diego, Galeria de la Raza of San Francisco, and Recyclart in Brussels, Belgium.

Education

Natalia Anciso with author Sandra Cisneros.

In addition to practicing art and exhibiting her work, Anciso has taught art to a diverse array of youth through non-profit organizations, ranging from the Oakland Leaf Foundation's Urban Arts Program in the Fruitvale District of East Oakland to the Summer Institute for the Gifted at the University of California, Berkeley. She worked most recently as the Art Director for the Mission Clubhouse of the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco.^[11]

For several years, she has taught Grades K-8 as a Substitute Teacher, both day-to-day and long-term, in the San Lorenzo Unified School District, the San Leandro Unified School District, and the Oakland Unified School District.^[12] In fulfillment of her teaching credential requirements, Anciso is currently finishing her student teaching in elementary schools in East Oakland through the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Education's Developmental Teacher Education program.^[13]

Recognition

Anciso's contributions as an artist have been recently acknowledged by The Huffington Post, who identified her as one of "13 Latina Artists Under 35 You Should Know,"^[14] as well as Latina Magazine, which has named her as an Innovator in their Latina 30 Under 30 list of the "Brightest Young Stars in Film, Music, Social Media and Activism."^[15]

References

External links

• Official website