Monica Aissa Martinez

 I spent the morning going over all the Chicana artists listed on the sidebar. I wanted to pick an artist whose work I felt I could appreciate on its own, so that learning about them only added to my appreciation. The artist I felt most moved by was Monica Aissa Martinez. Just looking at the images, I really enjoy how it combines both sciences and the arts. As a biology major, I guess I always had an appreciation for the naturally occurring designs in nature, but I never thought of them as the way she presents them. There was a really beautiful connection I felt when I first saw her art.

Monica was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. While there, she received her BA in metals and ceramics at the University of Texas at El Paso. She moved on to get her Masters of Fine Arts at New Mexico State University, focusing on Drawing and Printmaking. She now lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona.

Her artwork is exhibited all across the country, including the Tuscon Museum of Art, the ASU Art Museum, Mesa Arts Center, Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Tempe Center for the Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and many more.

Her art has also been published in many publications, such as Java Magazine, LocalRevibe, Phoenix New Times, Huffington Post, and Arizona Republic. She has been commissioned by The University of Notre Dame and Arizona State University for limited edition prints.

And perhaps what is most important, where her ideas and inspiration come from, Monica says that her early ideas came from practices like yoga and philosophy - the spirituality that lives within our physical bodies. She later started to draw from the ideas of medicine and anatomy, combining the two to create the style she uses currently. In this way, her art can be thought of as an illustration of holism. Just in this drawing, titled "Portrait of Sophie," it is easy to see how the reality she portrays is one mixed of physical and spiritual components.