Ruth Buentello, Baby Daddy, 2012
Ruth Buentello is a first generation Chicana – her parents are from Piedras Niegras, a border town in Mexico. She grew up speaking Spanish and still does at home, holding on strong to her Mexican roots. Much of her work depicts family relationships. “That’s what I know best,” she says. “I don’t know anything else but my family and living with them.”
Her work often features her mother and father, and the relationship that they have – illustrating his masculinity and her femininity. In the video interview below, Buentello highlights a piece called “Under the Colchas,” in which her mother is laying down on the bed, and her father is sitting at the foot of the bed, wearing his cowboy hat.
Although Buentello draws from traditional Chicano/Mexican experiences, the way she expresses the themes in her artwork is contemporary and sometimes experimental. Together with the San Antonio based Chicana art collective, Más Rudas, her work takes on the form of bold installations and collage murals. On their Facebook page, they state they are “brown and proud” and “archiving our history, who else is gonna do it?”
To inquire about purchasing the screen print she produced as part the Serie XIX Artist in Residence program, Baby Daddy, please contact serie@serieproject.org.
Click on “more” to see the interview video and read the rest of the article…
Ruth Buentello is an interdisciplinary artist and public artist with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Chicago Illinois. She has exhibited at various spaces in Chicago and San Antonio like the Art Institute of Chicago, Mestizaje Gallery, Southwest School of Art ands Craft, UTSA Gallery, Mattie Rhodes Gallery, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. Her background in community murals began at the young age of 16 with San Anto Cultural Arts.
As a public artist she has worked collaboratively on projects with artists Cruz Ortiz, and Alex Rubio. In 2007 she worked as artist assistant to several mosaic projects with Chicago Public Art Group in Chicago .In 2008 she was lead artist in restoring a westside community mural Una Mesa Para la Gente that involved organizing workshops on mosaics and working with community youth.