Juliana Rico

Juliana Rico Artist Statement

Identity and representation are themes that are at the core of my art practice. I come from a background of rarely being “the norm” and consistently being “the other.” I am an introverted, queer, full bodied, woman of color. I am a 3rd generation Mexican-American who was not taught Spanish as a survival strategy to better assimilate into US society. I was taught to blend in, assimilate, embrace, and aspire to Eurocentric and Western ideas and ideals in order to succeed. This idea of fitting “the norm,” which can be decoded as embodying colonialist values, left me continually feeling like an outsider and an imposter who never quite fit in.

My artwork questions and counters the colonialist defaults to carve out a space for the voices of so many underrepresented groups who have not felt a sense of belonging or seen themselves reflected in art or media. Through personal investigations, long term projects, and continuous questioning of societal “norms” around aspects of intersecting identities I create a new and expanded perspective. There is no “normal” or specific way to be. My art serves as a lens to reflect the simultaneously expansive and specific communities and perspectives I embody.

Latinx Series, 2017-2020. Media typically portrays Latinx people under a limited viewpoint of stereotypes and tropes as imagined by a person outside of the community. These vague, generic, and oftentimes damaging interpretations leave out layers of complexity and truth. The Latinx American community is not a monolith. We come from a range of countries, speak different languages, have distinctive physical characteristics, hold various traditions, and have diverse interests, goals, and lives. Latinx Series is an ongoing project that documents Latinx people from a Latinx American perspective. A series of environmental portraits show the individuals photographed in a location and clothing they felt represented them, giving them agency over their image. These photographs show the wide complexity, range, and depth of Latinx Americans in our current and ever evolving socio-political climate.

Self Decolonization, 2020. The story and ideals of colonization are insidiously ingrained and normalized in most Americans on a deeply subconscious level. As a Latinx person, I recognize that there are immense amounts of racism, colorism, and anti-Blackness within our own marginalized community that are in part a result of colonization of the Americas. After years of research and practice around decolonization and antiracism, reading buried histories of women, queers, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), revising academic pedagogy and curriculum, I was ready to sit down and reflect on the pain and trauma of my own lived experiences. In the spring of 2020, I began to reflect more deeply on my own complicity and internalized ideas of white supremacy and antiblackness and how to eradicate them. Self Decolonization is an installation that documents a performance of myself facing and removing a mask of my own internalized white supremacy. A mask that I hadn’t realized allowed me to “pass” in various aspects of my life and profit from anti-Blackness. Removing the mask is the beginning of the extensive, tedious, and painful self-reflective process of decolonization. Confronting internalized prejudice, bias, and colonial values is one necessary step in achieving true racial justice and equality.

Watch Juliana speak about her background and her artistic practice.