ana atalaya magdalena
ARTWORKS WRITING ABOUT
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice combines self-portraiture and site-based historical research. Depictions of my body function as a poetic space in which to reconcile the parallel histories of colonial and cultural displacement from the land, with my own displacement from culture and self as a transgender woman of color. In these works, my body is an altar and an archive, documenting the interrelated histories of land, ancestry, and self. My self-portraits include sculptures, installations, and videos, incorporating archival sources, family photographs, personal ephemera, and found objects. In the installation Ofrenda for a Girlhood (2025), a deer antler gifted to me by my grandmother sits between a clay model of my body and a photograph of my aunt’s home in the village of Chimayo. In the sculpture My Heart is an Abandoned Claim (2026), turquoise found at the site of the Cerrillos mining district adorns a ceramic depiction of my own face, alongside life-size antlers made of sparkling micaceous clay. My work sits at the confluence of ancestral memory, embodied queer experience, and place-based knowledge. I offer my body as a tangible space for the incarnation of marginalized and invisible histories.
My perspective as an artist is deeply influenced by my Nueva Mexicana heritage, a term referring to the Indo-Hispanic peoples of New Mexico descended from Spanish, Jewish, and North/Central American Indigenous populations. I draw on iconography, traditions, and ceremonies from Nuevo Mexicano syncretic folk Catholic practices, blending these elements with fine art and new media techniques. I queer these practices through self-portraiture, proposing new meanings and relations between myself and my heritage. By interweaving the folklore, oral history, and written history of my ancestors with personal memory and self-documentation, I analogize the colonial territorialization of land and the patriarchal objectification of the body. In the video work Self Portrait As A Map of the New World (2022), I overlay cropped images of my own body, a year into medical transition, over photo camera footage of European sites related to the history of colonization. In american girldoll (2025), a short film created as part of my time as the Gephart Institute Resident in the Art of Democracy, I relate depictions of my culture in American popular media, and the transgender slang term doll through posing myself and the Nuevo Mexicana American Girl Doll Josefina Martinez, the first Hispanic Girl Doll produced by the company, at various historically and personally significant locations throughout the United States. In Sex Dolls 1-3, I adorn pieces of scrap wood, representing my body, with archival documents, barbed wire, geometric abstractions, and other found objects related to the history of tourism, property disputes, and land dispossession in Northern New Mexico.
I engage in self-portraiture particularly because I believe in the political and cultural significance of self-documentation among and by marginalized and minoritized communities. It is in our bodies that the complex histories of our land and communities live on. To honor those histories, I create self-portraits that reimagine the body, my body, as a site of history, a contested territory, and a sovereign landscape.
CV
EDUCATION
2025 Washington University in Saint Louis, B.A i.n Studio Arts with a Second Major in American
Culture Studies, Saint Louis, MO.
2020 The Oxbow School, Visual Arts Fall Semester, Napa, CA.
RESIDENCIES
2025 Gephart Institute, Atkins Fellow in The Art of Democracy, Saint Louis, MO.
2024 Yale Norfolk School of Art, Summer Residency, Norfolk, CT
SELECTED AWARDS
2024 Pushcart Prize Nomination, Fifth Wheel Press
2022 Pushcart Prize Nomination, Fifth Wheel Press
2022 James Merrill Prize for Poetry, Washington University English Department
2022 Howard Nemerov Prize in Poetry, Washington University English Department
2022 Subnivean Poetry Award Finalist, Subnivean
2021 Brower Youth Award Winner, New Leaders Initiative
2021 30 Under 30 Changemakers Award, National Alliance For Public Charter Schools
2020 Santa Fe Youth Poet Laureate, City of Santa Fe
2020 2nd Place in The Not From Around Here Exhibition, Napa Valley Museum
2020 First Place in Specialty Articles, New Mexico Press Women 2020 Communications Contest
2019 National Silver Key for Printmaking, Scholastic Awards
2019 Semi-Finalist, 7th Annual Jack Grapes Poetry Prize
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2026 The Duty To Win, Juried Exhibition, Alas De Agua Cultural Center, Santa Fe, NM.
2026 Homecoming, Group Invitational, NMSA Thaw Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.
2025 Between Miracles, Solo Exhibition, Alas De Agua Cultural Center, Santa Fe, NM.
2025 American Girl Doll, Film Screening, The Gephart Institute, Saint Louis, MO
2024 Summer Studio Tour, Group Exhibition, Yale Norfolk School of Art, Norfolk, CT
2024 Without Eating the Strawberry, Public Art, The Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate, Norfolk, CT
2024 Ouch, Group Exhibition, Des Lee Gallery, Saint Louis, MO
2023 Spring 2024, Group Exhibition, SIRSA Student Gallery, Florence, Italy
2023 Breaking Chains, Group Exhibition, SITE Santa Fe Museum, Santa Fe, NM.
2022 Full Circle: Returning to the Land and Reclaiming Ourselves, Group Exhibition El Museo Cultural, Santa Fe, NM.
2022 OJOS DIFERENTES , Site Specific Commission for the City of Santa Fe
2021 Partners in Art, Zane Bennett Gallery, Group Exhibition, Santa Fe, NM.
2020 Perspective 2, New Mexico School for the Arts Virtual Gallery, Juried Exhibition (Juror: Daisy Quezada), Santa Fe, NM.
2020 O'Gah Po'Geh Altar Project, Santa Fe Railyard Park, Public Art Installation, Santa Fe, NM..
2020 Not From Around Here, Napa Valley Museum Virtual Gallery , Juried Exhibition, Napa, CA.
2019 Perspective, New Mexico School for the Arts Gallery, Juried Exhibition (Juror: Arista Slater-Sandoval), Santa Fe, NM.
2019 IN CRISIS, ARTsmart Gallery, Curator, Santa Fe, NM.
2018 NMSA Juried Exhibition, Zalma Loften Gallery, Juried Exhibition (Juror: Alberto Zalma), Santa Fe NM.
2017 Whereabouts, Santa Fe Art Institute Gallery, Group Exhibition, Santa Fe NM.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
2024 She Who Eats Tourists, Fifth Wheel Press
2022 Folk Catholic in Which Chavez is a Saint, Simple Machines No. 2: Epochal Shift, Simple Machines
2022 Three Poems, Rising Phoenix Press
2022 Two Poems, Fall 2022 Issue, Snarl: A Journal of Literature and Art,
2022 Self Portrait as Artemisia, Walking to Class and other poems, Issue 05/The Subnivean Print Anthology, Subnivean
2022 On Sea Levels, Travel Literature, and My Natural Sense of Proportion, Flux Digital Anthology/The 2022 Print Anthology, Fifth Wheel Press
2022 The First Greasers, Issue 12, Colour Magazine
2022 Chicana Creation Story, Spring 2022, Spires Magazine
2021 See I Hate Preparing to Remember Someone, Fall 2021, Spires Magazine
2021 White Guilt, Edition No. X (10), Genre: Urban Arts
2021 Everything Feels Recent When You're Far Away, Axle Contemporary
2021 Poetry of the Pandemic, Pasatiempo Magazine
2020 Three Poems, Winter 2020 Issue, Change Seven
2020 Slick Talk, Ressistancia Issue no. 76, Magma Poetry
2020 DREAMS OF MONTEZUMA, Stalking Horse Press
2019 Ghosting Pt.1-2, Canvas Literary Journal
2018 Wetback and Depersonally, Inlandia Literary Journal
2018 Spanish Language Channel Writings, Rigorous Literary Journal
SELECTED PERFORMANCES
2022 Gen-erate presents: Race and Oppression as Seen Through Poetry, SITE Santa Fe Museum
2021 I AM Short Film, Ironweed Productions
2021 Farm Bill Zine Release Event, La Semilla Food Clinic
2021 Highgarden Hangout, Jean Cocteau Cinema, Panelist, Santa Fe, NM.
2021 Earth Day Presentation, The Allen Stevenson School, Lecture, New York, NY.
2021 Operation Wetback and Environmental Racism, The Packer Collegiate Institute, Lecture, New York, NY.
2021 What Do We Call Ourselves? A History of the Chicane Struggle and its Intersection at the Uplift Convergence, 2021 Uplift Convergence, Presentation, Santa Fe, NM.
2021 BigRead Virtual Kickoff, National Endowment for the Arts, Spoken Word, Santa Fe, NM.
2021 Sifting Through the Sediment, Santa Fe Art Institute, Panelist, Santa Fe, NM.
2021 BigRead Virtual Kickoff, National Endowment for the Arts
2020 Education and Community, 2020 National Charter School Conference, Keynote Speaker. Orlando, FL.
2019 Gina Tron Et Al at Form and Concept Gallery, Scribbler Santa Fe
2019 CA Conrad Et Al, Scribbler Santa Fe
2019 Readings from PLUSH, Op.cit Books
2019 Vanilla Extract, ArtSpring 2019, Lensic Performing Arts Center
SELECTED COVERAGE
2026 The Albuquerque Journal, Unsettled Anatomies, Article
2022 The Story of Art, Legit Productions, Docuseries
2021 The Guardian, New Mexico Fights to Escape Powerful Grip of Big Oil and Gas, Article
2020 Current Affairs, A Youth Climate Movement Rises in Northern New Mexico, Article.
2020 The Santa Fe New Mexican, Climate activist named Santa Fe's youth poet laureate, Article.
2019 The Santa Fe New Mexican, Teenage activist in Santa Fe fights for climate, Profile