HEALING VISIONS

Growing up in Little Village on Chicago’s South Side, Mexican American artist Elsa Muñoz spent much of her youth indoors, away from the threat of violence on the streets. But gifted with a rich imagination, deep spirituality, and love for beauty, the sanctuary she cultivated within herself sustained hope and then found beautiful expression as Muñoz became a painter.

Dark, photorealistic landscapes of forests, seas, and skies, dreamlike depictions of sacred medicine bags, or smoky panels of prescribed forest burns—Muñoz’s finely detailed paintings are all an expression of desahogamiento, which means “the act or process of undrowning” when translated from Spanish.

A healing technique within curanderismo or Mexican folk medicine, desahogamiento was a word Muñoz’s mother, Maria, used a lot. Maria believed in grieving as medicine—the self-directed, embodied “grief work” that makes healing possible.

Likewise, Muñoz’s paintings center on healing. Exploring intuitive ways of knowing (such as dreamwork and storytelling,) responding to changing climate realities, and approaching art as a somatic healing technology, “my paintings manifest from the act of undrowning,” she says.

From the time she was a little girl, Muñoz thought and listened deeply. Although her mother had no formal schooling, she taught herself to read and spent long hours poring over books with Muñoz. “She was an innate thinker and seeker who saw my sensibilities and supported me in every way she could. She tells me I always chose the longer stories, where the main character goes on a long journey of some kind—gets lost, fights a monster, learns a lesson. I’m still very much that way,” Muñoz laughs.

But it was poetry that moved Muñoz most powerfully in those early years because it connected her to beauty. “In a very literal sense, poetry untethered me from the limits of my surroundings,” she says. “I remember sitting under the dining room table or in the boiler room of our attic almost daily, with a thick English textbook on top of my legs in search of new poems. This meditative act was almost wholly responsible for helping me build my inner world. I realized that beauty mattered deeply—not only as a salve from ugliness, but as an introduction to a deeper conversation with ourselves, the world around us, and the vast uncertainty within and beyond those borders.”

Painting the beauty she experienced within and without came later. During college, she switched from studying psychology to art after visiting The American Academy of Art, where she eventually graduated. She still remembers the moment her guide gently lifted an oil painting from a drying rack for her to see. “Such alchemy!” she recalls. “Colors, shapes, and lines coalesced to somehow form an exquisite, almost breathing face. It was magic.”

Muñoz’s animist lens for viewing human interaction with the earth and living things was deeply informed by childhood stories steeped in magical realism. In one such story, her mother, who as a child worked the fields of Central Mexico tilling soil and planting seeds while barefoot, developed such fear of the unearthed scorpions and snakes that she became very ill. A neighboring wise woman knew an unusual cure: she took the child and placed her on a red ant hill where, instead of biting, the swarming ants absorbed the poisonous fear into themselves and died, leaving the child healed.

“The idea that ants can conspire to heal was one of the stories that informed my enchanted way of thinking about the natural world. I paint that magic into things,” Muñoz explains.

Muñoz’s Medicine Bag paintings exemplify this. While medicine bags are small pouches traditionally used by indigenous peoples of the Americas to hold sacred items for healing, the vision for Muñoz’s series was born in a dream. “I saw a very tall glass jar containing water, herbs, and three large silver coins,” she recalls, “this very clear image of what felt like a folk medicine ritual. I had been reading about genetic memory: the possibility that our genes can hold memories and knowledge passed down from our ancestors, and that made so much sense to me. I began painting with this beautiful idea that we can access ancestral wisdom through liminal spaces like dreams.”

In each of the paintings, the bags are filled with simple objects— tap water, alley plants, flowers from the garden—and are transparent “gesturing toward the importance of communal care,” says Muñoz. “The idea is that we can create new rituals using readily accessible items, alluding to the belief that there is medicine all around us.”

Many collectors know Muñoz best for the Controlled Burn series she has been painting for more than ten years. One of the paintings, The Great Turning, a 30”x30” oil on panel, was included in DePaul Art Museum’s Life Cycles exhibit last fall and then chosen to become part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Inspiration for the Controlled Burn paintings goes back to a visit Muñoz made in third grade to a nature preserve. There a forest ranger showed her a prescribed burn—an indigenous practice used throughout the world to maintain a forest’s health and replenish the soil. The idea that fire, which can be so destructive, could also be a healing force deeply impacted Muñoz. “Through painting medicinal fire, I seek to make quiet images that provide some psychic space to help us see the contours of, and ‘stay with the trouble,’ [in our world] ecological and otherwise.”

Currently dividing her time between her home in Chicago (main studio at the Zhou B Art Center in Bridgeport) and Madrid, where she goes for special projects, Muñoz is now painting a new series, Fire Followers, that builds on the Controlled Burn painting themes. “It’s a series about wildflowers that bloom only after a fire,” Muñoz sums, “which I think is an incredible metaphor for resilience.”

For more information, visit elsamunoz.com.