Diana Guerrero-Maciá

Diana Guerrero-Maciá, The Devil's Daughter is Getting Married, wool, dye, deconstructed clothing and textiles on canvas, 57.5" x 49.5", 2020.

Diana Guerrero-Maciá (born 1966) is an American studio-based artist who has produced paintings, works on paper, prints and sculpture. She is known for her hybrid or "unpainted paintings"—works constructed with fabric cutwork, collage, stitching and dye that collapse boundaries between the fields of painting, fiber and design and challenge distinctions between "high" art and craft. Her largely abstract work samples and revises multiple materials, symbols and typography, and graphic elements such as grids, stripes and archetypal shapes to engage with color, iconography and diverse cultural movements and conventions.

Guerrero-Maciá has exhibited in solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), Artpace and South Bend Museum of Art, and group exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Crocker Art Museum and John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC), among others. In 2021, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, following earlier awards from organizations including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and MacDowell. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Crocker Museum, and South Bend Museum of Art.

Biography Guerrero-Maciá was born in 1966 in Cleveland, Ohio to Cuban immigrant parents. Her mother was a Spanish literature professor and quilter and her father an industrial design engineer and inventor. She has taught in the Fiber & Material Studies and Painting & Drawing departments at SAIC, serving as chair of the former from 2016 to 2019. In the large-scale work, The Bigger Picture, she operated like a concrete poet, creating a visual mountain out of the letters that comprise the word "mountains." Like her text pieces, these works connected ubiquitous icons—in this case, smiley faces, rainbows, targets, butterflies, hearts—with art historical references through graphic schemes, using diagrams or charts to reinvigorate their meanings and pose questions through cryptic personal and cultural references (e.g., her "Slow Blossoming" works, 2016). Among those meanings were messages embedded within the work's laborious, deliberately analog, handmade processes and tactile materials, related to gender and sexual equality, environmental and military concerns, cosmic speculation, and art/craft hierarchies. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and South Bend Museum of Art.