ARTIST | EDUCATOR | LEADER
I am a studio artist and a leader in northern New Mexico’s arts and culture education sector. My creative practice is a search for a visual language that synthesizes the cultural influences of my childhood with material, conceptual, and formal frameworks of modern and contemporary art. It’s a question-based assembly that asks: can my practice rematriate forgotten visual and historical genealogies and, in so doing, relieve the extraordinarily painful tension between my lived experience and how I am perceived in the world? This question drives the intersection of my studio projects, public programs and collaborations, workshops and curricula, and alliances by and for women of color.
Cristina González is a multidisciplinary artist whose studio practice explores personal, cultural, and ancestral memory and story. Her source material and visual references are informed by Chicana mestizaje and the places that she has called home stretching from San Antonio, Texas to California’s Sacramento valley; from Mexico City to northern New Mexico. González also cultivates partnerships for public art and art education. She is a member of Mezcla, a collective of women artists and writers of color who orchestrate conversations, rituals, and ceremonias with students, teachers, and fellow creatives.
González earned her B.A. in Art from Yale and her M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Washington, Seattle. Among the artist grants she has received are fellowships from Skowhegan, Yale, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, and the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. She co-designed “Warrior’s Repose,” a public memorial commissioned for the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque that is the first, permanent, Vietnam War memorial dedicated to Chicanos in the United States.
She is also known as a dynamic and dedicated teacher who believes deeply in the arts as an essential path to transforming the educational landscape of northern New Mexico. González currently works as the Arts Education Coordinator for Santa Fe Public Schools, supporting approximately 40 art and design educators across Santa Fe. She also serves on the New Mexico Advisory Council on Arts Education, the SITE Santa Fe Board of Directors and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation Board of Directors.
She lives in Santa Fe with her husband and two children.