Tessie Salcido Whitmore
[Image description: Tessie sits on the hood of a rusted, abandoned old car in a brush-filled landscape. She has long brown hair and brown skin. She is wearing red-tinted sunglasses, a patterned shirt, and flared corduroy pants.]
Tessie Salcido Whitmore’s work is about identity, hidden and discovered. Her aesthetic choices are influenced by her time on the road following the Grateful Dead; California counter-culture; her childhood spent in a matriarchal household of New Age holistic health, philosophies, and religion; and being mixed race. She explores this through the act of collecting and letting materials come together in odd ways. Using quotidian materials, such as found objects, 99-cent store colorful seasonal items, and common household goods, she is interested in finding a mystical sense in the mundane. She creates installations, sculptures, and photographs that use a lens of pop and counter-culture to investigate representations of women, domesticity, the other, and New Age religion.
Salcido Whitmore (b. 1969, El Monte, CA) received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, 2012, and her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach, 2009. She was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, 2015 and was the recipient of the OC Art Grant, 2012, and the Albert B. Friedman Grant Award, 2011.
Recent shows include Other Places Art Fair 2020, online at OPaf.info; a solo project, I Rang a Silent Bell at Art Produce Gallery; A Show about Touching at Bread and Salt Gallery; Magick is Afoot at Arvia Los Angeles; Parallels to a Fictional Universe, L’oiseau présente and Botschaft, for B-LA Connect, Berlin, Germany; High Key: Color in Southern California at San Diego Art Institute; Bitter Candy at Vermont Studio Center, Gallery II; Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, organized by Los Angeles Nomadic Division; and Floor Flowers, curated by David Pagel, Claremont Graduate University.
Read about her work on HereIn: