Foreword to the Show
My Hair Story: from Brunette to Gray features twenty-two years of embroidered human hair artworks by Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, a Spanish and Coahuiltecan artist. The exhibition highlights Meza-DesPlas’ meticulous artistic process of translating drawing techniques into sewn lines and documents the evolution and experimentation of her use of hair. Using the human body as a visual framework, Meza-DesPlas’ veracious portrayal of the feminine body challenges conventional beauty standards and emphasizes the mutable nature of a face.
Historically rooted in the women’s craft movement of the 1970s, My Hair Story: from Brunette to Gray transforms hair from an ordinary fiber into a symbol of age, beauty, health, power, race, religion, sexuality, and social class. Through Meza-DesPlas’s sewing dexterity, critical eye, and dedication to medium, hair and its material culture acquire a symbolic aspect that challenges viewers to look at identity and femininity from a new perspective. Historical and critical research and writing inform the artist’s thematically driven art, which communicates a feminist perspective on long-standing socio-political issues and cultural misconceptions.
-Spencer Linford, communications
Peck, Not Prick, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
Artist Statement
As a multidisciplinary artist, I create figurative artworks that explore the intersection of gender inequality, political agency, and cultural misconceptions. Challenging beauty standards, the feminine body is portrayed with attention to veracity. Portraiture work emphasizes the mutable nature of the face. My studio practice varies from labor intensive hand-stitched hair art to large on-site, multimedia installations.
Feminism and ethnicity are referenced in a common material, human hair, employed in my studio practice. I sew with the first fiber: hair. My sewing can be contextualized within the 1970s women’s craft movement, yet I stitch hair from a drawing-based background. The hair serves as an archive of my body and reflects the aging process. A carrier of DNA, hair symbolizes ethnicity and race.
Identity and culture manifest in my traditional art forms of painting and drawing. Displayed multiples create sizable and organized installations. Through appropriation, these traditional media works are reinvented into specialty fabrics and embedded into performance art and video.
I forefront myself in the performance art and video works; thereby, alluding to the multiplex experience of being an American Latina woman. My poetry anchors the performance art and video works. Academic research and writings reinforce the thematic inquiries into gender topics, socio-political issues, and cultural stereotypes.
–Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
