Join artist Yvette Mayorga and scholar Emmanuel Ortega for a gallery talk discussing Pu$h Thru, Yvette’s first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche.

Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Her works link feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. They flaunt a maximalist aesthetic rooted in personal narrative and familial histories to examine the Latinx experience in the US. Mimicking the confectionary labors performed by bakery workers, Mayorga uses piping bags to thickly apply her signature bubblegum pink acrylics to varying sized canvases.

Mayorga (b.1991, Moline, IL) holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Notable solo exhibitions include The Golden Cage at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, MX (2024); Dreaming of You at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023-24); and What a Time to Be at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; John Michael Kohler Art Center, WI; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; DePaul Art Museum, IL; Vincent Price Art Museum, CA; The Center for Craft, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, among others.

Mayorga’s works are in the permanent collections of 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, KY; Cerámica Suro, Guadalajara, MX; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; and New Mexico State University Art Museum, NM; and Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C. Awards and fellowships include the Cerámica Suro Residency (2023), New Mexico Arts Artists Residency at New Mexico Art Museum (2022) and the Individual Artist Program Grant in Chicago, IL (2022) among others. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Emmanuel Ortega is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a curator, and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library (2023–2025). Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, ex-votos, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. His recently curated a traveling art show titled “Contemporary Ex-Votos Devotion Beyond Medium” and the accompanying catalog was published by the New Mexico State University Art Museum in the spring of 2024. An essay for the 2023/2024 MexiCali Biennial catalog titled “Creating from a Place of Un/Belonging: The MexiCali Biennial and Art at the Edges of Empire” was published this summer. His book Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge.

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