Diana Guerrero-Maciá

In exhibitions at the MCA Chicago (2003), Artpace (2005) and Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery (2003, 2006), Guerrero-Maciá presented text-based, hand-sewn textile works and collages that reviews compared to ransom notes, commercial signage and the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Jenny Holzer.[10][11][1][6] Made up largely of words with differently stitched, colored and shaped letter forms, they quoted films, songs and literature, newspaper headlines and colloquial speech—often statements involving love and war—in challenging arrangements that used odd word mash-ups or breaks to alter meanings.[1][26][21] Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner wrote that the fiber medium and its stitched technique created a "mildly startling" sense of strangeness unachievable in painting and at odds with the vaguely familiar sentiments being reproduced.[1]

In her show "Devoured by Symbols" (Tony Wight, 2008), Guerrero-Maciá recontextualized incongruous, familiar or banal mediated text and, increasingly, imagery in stitched, multi-textile works that playfully reworked painting conventions invoking the sublime: landscape, portrait, narrative, abstraction (e.g., The Tempest, Like a Rainbow).[8][23][27] In the large-scale work, The Bigger Picture, she operated like a concrete poet, creating a visual mountain out of the letters that comprise the word "mountains."[23] New City described the show as a "convergence of typography … feel-good imagery, fuzzy materiality and tragically romantic quotations" that evoked contemporary political anxiety and a sense of "good wishes unfulfilled."[8]

Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Always the Sun (An Intersectional Sunrise), exhibition installation image, Kohler Art Center, 2021.

In the 2010s, in exhibitions at Traywick Contemporary (Berkeley), the South Bend Museum of Art and Carrie Secrist (Chicago), among others, Guerrero-Maciá gradually shifted emphasis from text toward borrowed symbols and archetypal forms that she cut, dyed and stitched into bold, geometric compositions.[5][28][12][25][29] Like her text pieces, these works connected ubiquitous icons—in this case, smiley faces, rainbows, targets, butterflies, hearts—with art historical references through graphic schemes, using diagrams or charts to reinvigorate their meanings and pose questions through cryptic personal and cultural references (e.g., her "Slow Blossoming" works, 2016).[30][6][28][31] Among those meanings were messages embedded within the work's laborious, deliberately analog, handmade processes and tactile materials, related to gender and sexual equality, environmental and military concerns, cosmic speculation, and art/craft hierarchies,.[5][2][25]

Guerrero-Maciá's show "Siblings of the Sun" (2015) explored the theory that unknown universes were created by the Big Bang, its centerpiece an array of fifty small collages featuring bright color and simple geometric forms that DeWitt Cheng described as "an apt metaphor for the current art cosmos: pluralistic, hybrid, and buzzing with free-floating contradictions."[2] Her "The Beautiful Girls" (2018) edition of prints presented diverse representations of gender and ethnicity through the visual motif of eyes, inspired by Hannah Höch’s Ethnographic Museum photomontages of the 1920s.[9] In the show "The Devil's Daughter is Getting Married" (Secrist, 2020) and works such as Always the Sun (An Intersectional Sunrise) (JMKAC, "High Touch" exhibition, 2021), Guerrero-Maciá presented paper collages and monumental gridded fields of cut cloth ornamented with three-dimensional props and familiar graphic motifs, which explored the visual pleasure of decoration, as well as subtle narratives about the ambitions of modernist abstraction, needlework and feminism, myth and her Cuban upbringing.[4][7][15]