Artist Statement -- Cristina Acosta

I am American - a mix of Spanish, Native American, and Anglo — a living confluence of cultures that have not always peacefully coexisted in the world, but which have always coexisted within me. I make art from that confluence. I always have.

My earliest memory of making is also my earliest memory of faith. In our home, beauty was a spiritual act — an arranging of flowers, a placing of objects, a lighting of candles that were not decorations but conversations with something larger than ourselves. I absorbed this without words, the way children absorb everything that truly matters — through the hands, through watching, through the body's quiet knowing. I have been making altars ever since.

I work in mixed media — oil paint, acrylic, encaustic wax, precious metal leaf, mosaic, drawing materials and resin glaze — primarily on wood panel, because wood is alive, because its grain breathes through my paintings the way ancestry breathes through a life. My subjects span the wild American landscape and the sacred feminine interior — bison moving through Yellowstone snow, raccoons negotiating a family crisis in an ancient tree, bears standing as rooted elders in California oak groves, and Marian retablos that hold Guadalupe and the Corn Maiden and Spider Woman in the same arms simultaneously. To me these are not different bodies of work. They are the same conversation conducted in different registers.

The wildlife paintings are altars. The retablos are ecosystems. Both ask the same question — what does it mean to belong to a place, to a lineage, to the living web of all creation?

My grandmother rode a horse through a prairie of yellow Mule's Ear flowers in 1922 and looked at the camera with eyes that held entire worlds I am still learning to read. I painted her as I believe she truly was — surrounded by wild blooms, accompanied by her coyote spirit, blazing with quiet authority. I discovered later that another ancestor had walked in the Reconquest of 1692 and helped establish La Conquistadora — the oldest continuously venerated Madonna in America — in Santa Fe. I had already painted her. My hands knew before my research confirmed it. This is what I mean when I say I meditate while I paint — I am not decorating surfaces. I am following threads back through time, through blood, through the land itself.

I was my mother's firstborn — the first of seven — and also the one she could not hold. I have spent thirty years re-mothering myself through this work. Every retablo I have made has been a conversation with the sacred feminine I needed — arms open, face calm, holding light without apology. My Guadalupes hold what my mother could not. In making them, I have slowly learned to do the same.

My Eve does not fall. She stands at the center of her blazing tree and offers consciousness like a mother offers food — with open hands, with love, with the absolute conviction that knowledge is not danger but gift. My bears stand rooted and wise. My coyotes leap with trickster joy. My raccoons peer from their hollows with enormous, curious eyes. My grandmother rides through flowers that were always hers.

Everything I paint is an act of gratitude — for the land, for the ancestors, for the unbroken line of women whose hands shaped mine before I ever picked up a brush. These paintings are ex-votos in the New Mexican Spanish tradition — images made to commemorate life's blessings, altars built to share them.

I place the meaningful things together.

I have the conversation.

Art is my practice. Art is my prayer. Art has always been my way of saying thank you for the extraordinary, difficult, luminous gift of being alive in this particular body, on this particular land, at this particular moment in the long story of humankind.

I am still making altars. I always will be.