Gabriela Muñoz

Beginning with earth harvested from the Chihuahuan desert and her own breastmilk, Gabriela Muñoz created an ink. Expertly familiar with the process of screen-printing, the idea of printing directly onto the skin felt like a natural progression for a new series began in 2021 focused on different forms of embodiment related to the brown body.

In Earth Tattoo #1 Muñoz’s mother sits alone in a desert landscape, rooting herself to place. On her back is a rendered portrait of herself and her granddaughter intertwined. A portrait Muñoz felt compelled to make in response to migrant children forcefully separated from their parents at the border. Recently having revealed that she herself was undocumented for many years, the tragedy of family separation was especially difficult to process. Printing the portrait of her mother and child, the portrait represents their three generations unbroken by circumstance and rooted in each other.

In Brownmilking A Future, the artist emblazons the phrase on her bare chest in a viscous paste divergent from her usual applications of breastmilk and earth. The term “brownmilking” is referenced in the song Rooted by the artist Ciara, a song that carried Muñoz throughout the pandemic like an anthem. In the song, a heavily pregnant Ciara vocalizes the importance of nurturing seeds of love, hope, and pride throughout communities of color, but most importantly in our youngest generations. In this sense, brownmilking is the sharing of heritage, culture, continuity, and strength. It is the purposeful reclamation of narrative, an essential component in carving out identity and visions of futurity.

Originally installed and performed with collaborator M. Jenea Sanchez as a 30-foot-long wall in SMoCA’s 2016 exhibition When Push Comes To Shove, Labor is a modular, site-specific piece. The sculpture is created from hand-made bricks produced in Colonia Ladrillo in Agua Prieta, Sonora MX, where the members of the DouglaPrieta Trabajan (DPT) live and work. The serigraphed portraits The serigraphed portraits honor the women’s labor and their self-determination in producing bricks with their neighbors and family and building their own gathering center.

DouglaPrieta Trabajan began in 2003 as a grassroots self-help project in Agua Prieta, Sonora, just across the border from Douglas, Arizona. DPT’s purpose has always been to assist individuals and families in colonias populares, or poor neighborhoods, by developing local capacities for economic self-sufficiency. DPT operates under the belief that communities can cultivate solidarity and self-determination by making local neighborhoods more productive. Today, the centerpiece of the program is a permaculture demonstration site designed to teach families sustainable food production techniques, including gardening, aquaculture, and small livestock raising. The goal is to reduce the cost of living and at the same time build an ethic of mutual aid among neighbors in order to reduce dependency on weak job markets, government assistance, charity, and border crossing. This work honors their labor in nourishing their communities.

Caldo de Pollo is a video and installation piece made in 2020 as a collaborative effort between M. Jenea Sanchez, Gabriela Muñoz and the women of the DouglaPrieta Trabajan collective. The work is a celebration of reacquired knowledge and speaks to the idiom of chicken soup as medicine or food for the soul. For the production of this piece, the artists traveled to Agua Prieta, Sonora to learn the act of preparing chicken soup in the traditional way commonplace to their ancestors. From the raising of the animals, to their humane butchering, and their careful preparation into a meal that nourishes. The piece remarks on the importance of having a healthy connection to and understanding of food production, and the labor behind food sovereignty. Sanchez’s and Muñoz’s children and mothers accompanied them to participate in the learning experience, connecting a previously broken link in the passing on of this knowledge.

The two tables that form part of the exhibition were commissioned by the artists from DPT’s Migrant Carpentry Workshop in Colonia Ladrillo, a volunteer based program DPT created space for as a way of providing opportunities for work to migrants detained at the border, fostering a mission that values labor as an act of dignity and opportunity. The larger of the two tables depicts portraits of the women who taught the artists, their children, and their mothers these new, valuable skills. On the smaller table rests a portrait of Munoz’s mother and daughter opposite Sanchez’s mother and son signifying the link to heritage through shared knowledge.

Performed in 2018, Brownwashing is a site-specific piece. It is constructed with locally sourced bricks that paved the road up to the hospital in the town of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. The bricks were assembled in a circle with an opening that migrated/shifted as the bricks were installed and re-installed in a circular pattern, on top of itself. The inside of the structure was painted and coated in a mixture of the artist’s breastmilk and Mexican earth.

Through the ongoing series Brown on Brown, Muñoz conveys body politics through art expressly modeled on her aesthetic interpretation of the female experience. Drawn by the most intimate recesses of both the private and the personal, Muñoz presents a framing of self and subjectivity through the everyday, and contends that the female body serves as a site of power. Initiated in 2017 and continued as an ongoing series, these portraits feature women who nurture their communities. Each portrait is rendered using a mixture of Mexican earth and the artist’s breastmilk as ink. The portraits are then directly screen-printed onto found, hand-embroidered objects, an homage to invisible and domestic forms of labor that manifests throughout the work.

The use of breastmilk was sparked by the artist’s own personal journey breast feeding her daughter, a process she describes as difficult and laborious. The choice of medium was inspired by a feeling of loss, late one evening, as she dumped breastmilk down the sink while away from her daughter. In that moment Muñoz began thinking of the dichotomy existent in the unseen art of nurturing. Not only in the contradictorily beautiful, painful, and difficult act of a woman nursing - or nurturing - a child, but in the similar act of labor and love that comes of women nurturing their communities and environments.

In the work is an intimate examination of the parallel existence between the two forms of nurturing, both relegated to being an invisible and solitary effort. Rarely is there encouragement for women to speak on the process - physically, emotionally and mentally. Stricture of societal taboos dictate a woman may be able to breastfeed her child but should do so out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Media dictates that a woman’s body should focus around its sexual and reproductive functions, completely removed from some of its other natural processes that mark just as critical a role. Muñoz’s use of breastmilk speaks to the selfless act of nurturing, and the unseen labor behind it that reminded her of the work the women she depicts on her portraits do. Her work stands as a reclamation of the interplay between a woman’s public and private space, and the invisible labor that lies undetected in the spaces between.

This ongoing series of portraits began in 2018, depicts women who nurture their communities. Serigraphed onto hand-embroidered tablecloths, they honor the work of each woman and domestic forms of labor, represented in the embroidery. Each piece is constructed with ink made of breastmilk and earth taken from the Sonoran desert region.

This ongoing series was started in 2016. Each sculptural portrait has 3 corresponding wall pieces with personal objects vacuum-formed onto the printed acrylic panes. The sculptures are formed with 5 slide-like panes with imagery that reflects each woman’s background.

This site specific installation was produced in 2012. The walls are constructed with handmade paper formed with desert plant fibers indigenous to the Sonoran desert. The vacuum-formed pieces installed on the perimeter of the walls record the objects left behind my migrants as they made their path north from Mexico. The printed works alongside the outer walls reflect the locations where the objects were found and bits of the artist’s family history.

La Tapiz Fronteriza de la Virgen de Guadalupe is a public intervention and performance created in collaboration with M. Jenea Sanchez. It was installed onto the border fence dividing Douglas and Agua Prieta in 2009. The piece is made with india ink on handmade paper produced with yuca and cholla plant fibers taken from the lot adjacent to the border fence.

Interstitial is a sculpture created for The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes & Lifescapes exhibition, held in 2011 at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. The piece is made with handmade paper walls sewn together and carved planks of wood. Vacuum-formed acrylic sheets document objects left behind by migrants in the Sonoran desert.