Meet Blanka Amezkua

We were lucky to catch up with Blanka Amezkua recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Blanka, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I believe my resilience comes from my parents, as I observed their dedication to their family, to life despite the numerous challenges they faced as immigrants in a foreign country, a country quite different from their place of birth. My resilience also comes from seeing and learning from my local community members, in the infinite ways they confront all of their challenges on a daily basis.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I believe we are all cultural bearers…

It is my role not only as an artist, but as an immigrant, a woman, to create and reproduce culture. This is, in fact, the very basis of my survival.

Collaboration, radical pedagogy, and community building are central to my art practice and projects. My identity, experiences, and artistic decisions are shaped by the reality that I am an immigrant Mexican born-American artist living in New York City.

Formally trained as a painter, my creative practice is greatly influenced and informed by folk art and popular culture, from papel picado to comic books. I combine traditional and contemporary art practices and techniques, as well as sociocultural-based mythologies and philosophies as a way to preserve evidence of the past, not for sentimental reasons, but as a form of nourishment for the creative spirit of the present. Through art, I want to create alternative, yet accessible, and inclusive dialogues around the challenges and controversies we experience in society.

My creative work is driven by my profound interest in traditional techniques and personal, cultural concerns. My current project involves research I began at the Hispanic Society in NYC in 2021 and expanded during my residency at Wave Hill this past winter. After experiencing COVID-19, I learned of the existence of the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano or the Aztec Herbal book in the Hispanic Society’s library collection. The Codex de la Cruz-Badiano was made by Nahua knowledge keepers in the 16th century. In the middle of a global pandemic, I had the opportunity to sit with this book about healing, our physical selves and the collective body. It also happens to be the first medical book created in the Americas.

As the field begins to turn attention to decolonizing museum spaces, I am invested in the ways in which we re-indigenize our own practices as artists. What are the tools of survival we inherit from our ancestors and their traditions? What can they teach us, not only about how we make work, but how we move in the world, how we share and create space?

I am currently unearthing new ways to deepen this fascinating work.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

1. Adaptability. As an immigrant artist having lived in four different countries, I am not afraid of moving and starting over anywhere.

2. I am a very social person. This is something I inherited from my mother; she is the most social person I’ve known.

3. Knowledge of various traditional art making techniques, that have been passed on by elders and master artists. Such as embroidery and papel picado, a paper cutting technique I have been fortunate to know thanks to my papel picado maestro don Rene Mendoza from Huixcolotla, Puebla.

In the early stages of my journey, I realized the importance of volunteering.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

They allowed me to be and feel free.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.blankaamezkua.com
• Instagram: BlankaAmezkua_arte
• Facebook: Blanka Amezkua
• Linkedin: Blanka Amezkua
• Twitter: Blanka Amezkua

Image Credits

Photo by Leonidas Alexandropoulos