LOS ANGELES — Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery this fall features Sonia Romero in a 20-plus-year survey exhibition honoring her enduring and boundary-pushing art practice that addresses issues of social, cultural, and political significance, and her important contributions to the Los Angeles public art landscape.
“Sonia Romero: Taken Root” includes more than 50 pieces spanning the early 2000s to the present, celebrating the artist’s signature visual language that expanded the possibilities of the mediums of printmaking, painting and papercutting. The show opens at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sep. 23, and runs through Dec. 9, 2023.
Romero’s artistry exemplifies the identity and lived experience of a “both/and” artist. She has cultivated her own artistic path by synthesizing her Chicano heritage together with her Ashkenazi Jewish matrilineal line.
An artist since childhood, Sonia Romero’s multi-ethnic upbringing has been formative to the development of her individual expression that transcends categories of belonging as well as art making.
A native Angeleno, Romero’s artistic influence falls under the umbrella of “both/and” as well. Influenced by her grandmother Edith Wyle, founder of Los Angeles’ Craft and Folk Art Museum, her mother Nancy Romero, also a visual artist, and her father, artist Frank Romero, “Taken Root” considers how Romero, known for her methodical, and sometimes playful, art-making processes, blurs distinctions between the mediums of painting and printmaking, creating varied and complex artworks that belie a mere surface reading.
The artwork she produces – painted and collaged canvases, monoprints, linocuts and silkscreens as well as hand-painted tiles, embossed ceramics, and laser-cut steel forms – could be best described as materially and technically intertwined.
Calling herself a painter first, Romero, who studied all modes of printmaking as an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, credits her post-grad yearlong tutelage under graphic artist Artemio Rodriguez for setting her on a trajectory of mixing media.
Creating a calling card within the art world for her mastery of the linocut and its limitless possibilities of repetition, pattern and bold graphic qualities blossomed into an ever-evolving signature style in which prints merge within a painting, the linocut begets a paper-cut, the paper-cut becomes the model for a painting, and so on.
Romero’s earliest pieces in the exhibition, produced after completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and returning to Los Angeles, recall parables and tales passed down through children’s literature. After a year spent studying in Rome and interacting with visiting faculty such as the late Paula Rego at RISD, Romero conjured stories about labor, fantasy, and desire in her depictions of mostly female characters and narratives.
Long an astute observer and recounter of contemporary culture, Romero expresses her perspectives through her distinctive graphic language that is neither didactic nor heavy-handed and employs a set of recurring motifs — in particular trees, piles, and the body — to represent the different states of reality that she is depicting. “Taken Root” provides the first opportunity to consider her various bodies of work produced over the last 20 years in the context of one another.
Romero’s desire to connect her artwork to broad audiences is most pronounced in the more than 10 permanent public art commissions she has completed across Southern California. “Taken Root” will highlight five public artworks that illustrate her process; how she finds inspiration in narratives gleaned through research and community engagement; and pushes herself to develop new working and material strategies that further her artistic vision.
The exhibition “Sonia Romero: Taken Root,” will travel to the University of San Francisco’s Thacher Gallery in March 2025. The show was curated by Karen Rapp, Director & Curator at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, where it debuted in fall 2023.
