Picking up a pastry bag caked with pastel pink paint, Yvette Mayorga eyes one of six large, semi-autobiographical canvases hanging on the wall in her Pilsen studio.
“I’m interested in pink as skin,” Mayorga says.
Pink, with its varying saturations, is the dominant color in the room, a sharp contrast to the industrial landscape outside the window.
Mayorga, 33, has spent the past decade exploring pink — specifically how it functioned in 17th- and 18th-century Rococo painting. But while Rococo in Europe was often tied to luxury and leisure, Mayorga repurposes it, reclaiming the color and embedding it within the Latinx and immigrant experience in America.
Her approach has captured something unusual in the current cultural imagination. In the past few years, Mayorga has exhibited her work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas.
This month, Mayorga returns to Chicago, her home since 2014, with “Pu$h Thru,” a solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery. Featuring 14 new works and several smaller ones, it’s her first Chicago show since 2018.
“Yvette’s work makes me rethink the world,” says Emmanuel Ortega, a University of Illinois Chicago art history professor who has written extensively about the young artist’s work. “It asks you to sit down and think critically. But, at the same time, it’s joyful and visually seductive. That balance is rare.”
Fake nails, rhinestone charms and rodeo belts
From the sixth floor at Mana Contemporary, an industrial warehouse turned intoartist studios, Mayorga’s space is a playground of chromatic delights. Tables are piled with fake nails, rhinestone charms and rodeo belt buckles. Glitter, collage scraps and ceramic figurines mingle with spools of fabric and pastel party ephemera.
These are the raw materials that fuel Mayorga’s large, sculptural canvases — many which hang nearby, in progress, like portals into her saturated world.
In some ways, it feels like one big scrapbook — an extension, Mayorga says, of her favorite childhood pastime.
Growing up, Mayorga was the youngest of five in a close-knit Mexican American family in Moline. Much of her creative foundation was built at home. She’d draw with her siblings, create love letters with her brother and do collages in her diaries. Her favorite was a plush pink notebook from Claire’s, the millennial girl’s kitschy wonderland, topped with a frog-shaped pen.
“All my diaries had collages,” she says, with images of SpongeBob, Hello Kitty, Britney Spears and My Chemical Romance mingling across the pages.
Mayorga didn’t go to an art museum until she was a senior in high school, when her advanced painting class teacher organized a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Walking in to that grand room with all the statues — it was life-changing,” Mayorga says.
That helped steer her to the arts. She went on to study painting and anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
As an undergraduate, she started embedding candy into her portraits — frosting, sweets and sugary color as both material and metaphor. She later transitioned to plaster for durability before settling on acrylics and piping techniques that mimic the maximalism of those early sketchbooks.
A textured record of first-generation life in the Midwest
In “She’s in the cake/Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret,” a new, large-scale painting from the show, a birthday picnic unfolds across a lush green field: Children gather around a cake, their heads bowed in song, wearing gold party hats. A little girl — Mayorga’s younger self — leans into the cake in a family ritual in which the birthday child’s face is pushed into the frosting. Guests sip soft drinks, toy cars rest beside paper plates, and tinfoil balloons float against a sherbet sky.
But a close look reveals tensions, too. Adorned hands emerge from gift bags and the edges of the canvas — elongated, lacquered and almost grotesque. In the background, silhouetted couples cozying up to one another and protesters standing on cars dot the horizon.
Scenes like these do more than document her childhood. They offer a textured record of first-generation life in the Midwest.
“I’m thinking about ideas around American-ness and the things that we prescribe with being American or growing up here,” Mayorga says.
Making each painting becomes a metaphor, too. “She’s in the cake/Put out the fire,” for example, took more than 20 layers of paint and more than a year to complete. Each layer, Mayorga says, is an homage to her father, who worked a second-shift ob at a Tyson meat plant, and her mother, who spent years behind bakery counters and at Marshall Field’s.
“All of the labor my family has done — especially in the Midwest — feels important to document,” Mayorga says. “There’s something powerful about placing a job that isn’t gilded by society into a gilded frame.”
Mayorga refers to that mashup as “Latinx-oco,” her own visual language that combines the decorative language of Rococo and Latinx domestic life.
“Her work is a double-edged sword,” Ortega says. “You’re initially attracted by the richness, by the formal excess. But then you start decoding all of these references to labor, immigration, Rococo, feminist history. It’s not just aesthetics. It’s sociological, even political.”
In her paintings, Mayorga constructs a world in which beauty becomes both shield and strategy. As Mayorga puts it, the paintings are layered in every sense.
“There’s this assumption that pink or beauty is soft,” she says. “But I think that’s a trick. The work is playful, but it’s also talking about grief, about being first-gen, about being Latinx in America. It’s all layered in.”
