Studio Artist
Verónica Gaona is an interdisciplinary artist from Brownsville, Texas, a city along the Texas-México border landscapes, living and working in Houston. As a first-generation Mexican American from a family of working-class migrants who relocated to search for employment, Gaona considers the voices of displaced and exploited communities by materializing characteristics of diaspora such as transnationality, opacity, and impermanence to redress traditional approaches to memorialization. Her artwork exists at the intersection of digital media, performance, sculpture, and installation, and it brings to the foreground labor and spatial issues at play. Gaona received a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Houston and a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communications from The University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. In 2021, she was the recipient of the prestigious national Artadia Award. In 2022, Gaona participated as a panelist in Monumentality in Art: Memory, History, and Impermanence in Diaspora at the CAA Conference in Chicago. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Houston and will partake in Engaging Latinx Art: National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Featured Image: For those who do not return in life, there is always death (Homage to David Gomez) (2021), photo performance print on matte paper, 16 x 20 inches. Image courtesy of Verónica Gaona and Junior Fernandez.