Mónica Palma

Mónica Palma’s ideas are entwined with materials - they make sense only when acted upon and manifested.  She makes drawings through physical engagement, imbuing the surfaces (paper, clothing, ground, wall, skin) with the experience of touching, folding, pouring, and molding.  In recent years Mónica's studio-based work has bled seamlessly into performances conducted on the street, in which she integrates (and imprints) elements from the public environment.  The performances are also symbolic acts of disobedience in which she takes a piece of the city for her own, even if temporarily.  Mónica's materials—including ink, charcoal, tar, obsidian, and slate—which she gathers on the streets of New York, where she lives, and from markets in Mexico, her native country, speak to healing, to cycles of growth and decay, and to mythologies of subterrestrial forces bubbling under the surface of daily life.  In her work, actions become rituals and reverberations.

Mónica Palma was born in Mexico City and is based in New York City. Exhibitions venues include TSA, Brooklyn; 245 Varet Street, Brooklyn; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Underdonk Gallery, New York; Dixon Place, New York; and Soloway Gallery, New York. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Actualize Magazine, Temporary Art Review, and The Coastal Post. Palma studied visual art at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz and received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University.