Shizu Saldamando (born 1978 in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, CA), is an American

visual artist The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts al ...

. Her work merges painting and collage (often using origami paper) in portraits that often deal with social constructs of identity and subcultures. She has worked in the genre of arte

paño Paños are pen or pencil drawings on fabric, a form of prison artwork made in the Southwest United States created primarily by '' pintos'', or Chicanos who are or have been incarcerated. The first paños, made with pieces of bedsheets and pillowc ...

, a type of prison art involving portraits of family members and friends drawn in ball-point pen on napkins or handkerchiefs. Saldamando also works in video, installation and performance art.

Biography

Saldamando was born in 1978 to parents of Mexican-American and Japanese-American descent. She was raised in the Mission District of San Francisco. She attended the

California Institute of Arts The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art university in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of b ...

and the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

School of Arts and Architecture. Her work was included in the group exhibition "Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter" at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in 2011, Her work was also shown in "We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

," curated by Elizabeta Betinski as an official collateral exhibition of the 56th

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

. She was a resident artist at the Art Omi International Artist Colony in 2002.

Quotes

"A lot of what I try to capture are different subcultures or scenes in which people have created their own world outside of larger alienating constructs." "My friends and I would buy Teen Angels, a magazine of lowrider and cholo art, and try to copy the drawings of Aztec pyramids and warriors and naked girls. I think that's how I got good at ballpoint pen renderings." "Growing up in the Mission district in San Francisco, it was predominantly a hip-hop culture. Here in Los Angeles, I'd go to shows or house parties, and it would be all Latino kids listening to the Cure and the Smiths. In L.A., I felt normal for the first time."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saldamando, Shizu 1978 births Living people 21st-century American women artists 20th-century American painters Artists from San Francisco Collage artists California Institute of the Arts alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni 21st-century American painters 20th-century American women