The Armory Show

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's work at the 2023 Armory Show, Focus Section, curated by Candice Hopkins. Jimenez Underwood has been exhibiting her work since the 1980s, choosing to focus on the fiber arts at a time when weaving was considered “craft,” not “art.” As the daughter of a Huichol-descended father who weaved and a Mexican-American mother who embroidered, it has always been important to the artist to continue these ancestral practices and insist on their legitimacy in the artistic sphere. Her initial goal as an artist was to become a “footnote in history,” but in recent years she has far surpassed her ambition. In 2022, Duke University Press published an anthology on her decades-long career, titled Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision, and she was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship the same year. 

The works presented span from the early 2000s to the summer of 2023 and showcase Jimenez Underwood’s technical skills in weaving and mixed media. She is well-known for her innovative use of barbed wire, safety pins, yellow caution tape, and caution signs, which reflect perhaps the most central theme in her work: the U.S.-Mexico border. Growing up along the Calexico, CA–Mexicali, MX border, the artist moved back and forth between family homes on either side of the frontera, and on more than one occasion was separated from her father–who was undocumented in the U.S.–when he was deported. The beauty of her work is a conscious strategy to discuss difficult border topics such as violence, the separation of families, and environmental destruction, but border subjects are not monolithic in her work. Stories of survival and growth along the border carry equal importance and cause for reflection.

While Jimenez Underwood’s artworks are technically tight and aesthetically beautiful, their content is just as important. Every stitch is guided by lifelong reflections on a range of complex subjects. The artist states: “My work is a reflection of personal border experiences: the interconnectedness of societies, insisting on beauty in struggle, and celebrating the notion of ‘seeing’ this world through my tri-cultural lens.  Engaging materials, which reflect a contemporary hyper-modern sensitivity, are interwoven to create large-scale fiber art that is inspired in equal measures by land, politics and Spirit.”

Indeed, After visiting the Yaqui pueblos in Sonora, Mexico, Jimenez Underwood was struck by the tenacity and strength of their indigenous culture. Though the culture continued to survive, it had come at the cost of unnecessary death which left its mark on the community, leaving it in a state of instability. A denial of Indigenous rights, though state political suppression, is at the heart of the artist's practice.