¡Diache!: Work by the Juried Open Portfolio Award Winners

Maritza Dávila-Irizarry

About the Artist

Maritza Dávila is Professor Emeritus at the Memphis College of Art where she was professor of fine arts and the head of printmaking. She began teaching there in 1982 and received the prestigious Klyce Family Fund Benjamin Goodman Faculty Award in 2018 for her long service to MCA. She conducts workshops and teaches at the University of Memphis in addition to exhibiting her work worldwide.

Professor Dávila has exhibited around the world and has works in collections in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. She has received awards in the United States, Puerto Rico and France. Her work is included in collections at the National Library in Madrid, Spain; the National Library of Paris France; Taller ACE of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum of Art and History at the University of Puerto Rico; and the National Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., among others.

She is owner of the Atabeira Press studio and has collaborated with poet Kay Lindsey and visual artist Indrani Nayar Gall from India on various art projects. She was also a visiting artist at University of Bilbao, Spain in 2011 and the School of Fine Arts of the Institute of Culture of Puerto Rico among others. Residencies include Taller ACE in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2011 and Illinois State University’s Normal Editions in 2016.

As part of her research, exhibitions and in the making of her work, Professor Dávila has also travelled to Spain, France, Poland, England and Japan.

Artist Statement

The thread that runs through all my work is ancestry — the collection of inseparable qualities that, through blood and culture and beyond our ability to control, make us who we are.

And while we may not be able to consent to the qualities of the past that have shaped us, we do exercise choice in how we regard our essential selves.

In my work, the view to ancestry is represented by memories that are woven or contemplated through symbols of passage: windows, arches, doorways, gates. What we see, remember or pass through includes elements of family, culture and religion as well as social, racial and gender facets of life. In a word: Identity.

Each of us connects at all these levels through experience that unfolds with increasing complexity as we grow older. Even as those moments differ from family to family or from person to person, the experiences become a part of our essential selves.

 

Artist:

Maritza Dávila-Irizarry
Photo of artist Lily Jarrell

Social media: @mdavila.atabeira

Website: http://www.atabeira.com/

Exhibition

¡Diache!: Work by the Juried Open Portfolio Award Winners

My artwork reflects these experiences framed within frames. Exteriors blend with interiors and geometric shapes contrast with the organic to reveal shadings of womanhood, home relationships, environment and roots. Color and texture create an atmosphere of emotional and spiritual evolution.

Some of my work deconstructs and redefines my past and present. Images I’ve used are cut and reassembled by weaving or collaging, sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes deliberately.

My work engages the diverse elements of printmaking as well as collage and painting. Whether in two-dimensional mixed media works or dynamic three-dimensional books, there are endless ways of expressing the mysteries and power of ancestry.

 

A femme presenting individual with a Bob haircut faces ¾ to the left. They are printed in pink and blue, overlapping to make purple. The two layers are comprised of pink tiny scribbles placed very closely in a grid formation. The person hands are grabbing at their chest and have a far off expression on their face.  A lime green square grid overlaps itself in the background and on top of the person, leaving part of their face and chest exposed. </p>
<p>The print has distorted squares cut out of the paper. There is a bright pink scribble behind the cut out section, and in the upper right corner.<br />

Arising
Woodcut
29″ x 12″
2024

A quadriptych where each piece has its own plotter cut scribble atop a white sheet of BFK. Each shape is taken from previous work and scaled up. Each Mark is comprised of various shades of Fluorescent Pink, Fluorescent Blue, Purple and White.

Intercesiones
Screenprint, collage, monoprint
2025

A white abstract form sits atop a Fluorescent Pink background. The White shape is textured with a tight debossed grid. The pink background has a subtle pattern comprised of small visual bursts

Investiture
Coptic binding, screenprint
4″ x 4″
2025

A white plotter cut shape of an abstracted EKG of a panic attack sits upon a grid of green scribbles on a pink ground

Investiture
Coptic binding, screenprint
4″ x 4″
2025

A plotter cut scribble covered with pink and a grid of green scribbles sits on a fluorescent pink background.

Paisaje (landscape)
Collagraph, collage
2025

An abstract shape based on an abstracted EKG of a panic attack and given form. Inside this shape is a fluorescent pink wave pattern.

Taino Spain Africa
Silk aquatint collagraph triptych
30″ x 22″ each panel

A fluorescent pink abstract shape sits atop a background grid pattern comprised of much smaller abstract scribbled marks in a light teal color.

Transition
Screenprint, collage, monoprint
22″ x 15″
2025