POWER IN PINK

On first view, Chicago artist Yvette Mayorga’s ornate creations seem a fantasy in sugary pink, there just for the fun of it. Balloons bob, roses twirl, and cherubs fly like massive cake toppers in a patisserie dream. But as the intricate swirls and filigree draw you in to study the jaw-dropping detail, you realize there’s much more to the work than first meets the eye.

“Not everything is what we think it is,” says Mayorga, who has spent the last 12 years painting and sculpting works that are windows into her Y2K youth as a first-generation Mexican American and the Latinx experience of the illusory American dream.

The pink-laced approachability of her work is intentional, meant to pull the viewer in to contemplate the deeper, more difficult themes layered within. For example, the lavishly adorned interiors in her Polly Pocket-reminiscent Surveillance Locket series, seem pinkly perfect until you notice the gun-toting soldiers and immigration agents patrolling at the edges.

Always a deep thinker, while studying painting at the University of Illinois, Mayorga found herself drawn to two underdogs of the art world—the color pink and 18th-century Rococo. “Both were dismissed as frivolous or excessive,” she says. “But combined in my work, they have become powerful, world-building tools.” This is especially true as she expresses reactions to colonialism and labor from a Latinx perspective.

Both issues are deeply personal to Mayorga. So, too, the confectionary elements of her work. Mayorga’s parents emigrated to Chicago in the late ‘60s, followed by her grandfathers. Her mom worked in the bakery at Marshall Field’s and her grandfathers at the original Tootsie Roll factory on Chicago’s South Side. “It’s funny,” she says, “I actually came to working with sugar through exploring my family’s migration story while referencing colonialism. Finding that my familial labor histories had a shared sugar connection made me want to explore working with baking and decorating tools. I wanted to honor my family’s past labors with sugar directly through my use of materials, as another thread of our long history of labor contributions to the U.S.”

Mayorga began experimenting with edible materials in 2011, applying frosting through piping bags onto canvases and sculptural totems. As the work progressed, she transitioned to using industrial materials, then to paint, plus, in her new ceramic works, clay formulated to a pipeable consistency. Creating just one of her pieces can take anywhere from five months to two years. Each is a composition of objects—a collage of everything from rhinestones, dollar-store trinkets, and acrylic fingernails to false eyelashes, plus piped paint applied in many layers over custom-designed panels fabricated of canvas and wood.

This layering process is intrinsically linked to the messages embedded in the works. “My work has always been heavily research-based, always a reference and intervention within an art history context, and always inserting a new perspective within traditional painting,” says Mayorga.

“The layering of meanings and, literally, the layering of paint layers through the use of collaging paint on top of paint on top of paint is part of my process of covering and uncovering while creating a work,” she explains. “It’s the most exciting part for me—hiding a reference or iconography through several paint layers. I want the viewer to have a different perspective every time they interact and return to the work.”

For Mayorga, who never stepped into an art museum until she was 18, her summers spent with her family in Mexico, the religious iconography of the Catholic church, the knick-knacks in the domestic spaces, the family archive, the hue “Mexican Pink,” and youth culture were early inspirations for her take on Rococo. Within that, many paintings recontextualize portraits by 18th-century Rococo painter François Boucher while another gorgeous triplet of sibling portraits took inspiration from 17th-century lithographer Martin Engelbrecht.

Currently, Mayorga is in Mexico exhibiting at Guadalajara’s Museo de Arte de Zapopan for her first international solo museum exhibition, La Jaula de Oro. She is also doing her second ceramics residency at Cerámica Suro while there. “I’m always dreaming up new possibilities of exploring my ideas through clay,” she says. “I find it to be such an exciting and challenging material to work with. You have to let go of your sense of control and be open to unexpected possibilities. I really love that.”

Looking ahead, Mayorga says she is interested in talking more about the female body, reproductive rights, and health. “These issues feel extremely pressing for me and of course are tied to gender, identity politics, and migration that are all at the core of my work.”

To view Mayorga’s work locally, her Vuela Vuela sculpture at 520 N. Michigan is one of 29 sculptures on display as part of Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s Flight of the Butterflies citywide exhibit, or visit Millennium Park to see The Lovers Dance, her first augmented reality public work up through November. On October 6, Mayorga will host visitors and share her artistic practice in her studio as part of Chicago Exhibition Weekend’s studio crawl. She also has an upcoming show at Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery in June 2025 and will be participating in the Times Square Arts public art exhibition in 2025. For more information, visit yvettemayorga.com.