As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Lorena Diosdado had intended to major in bioengineering. But after taking a few studio art classes, her professors encouraged her to pursue art. “I’m a first-generation Mexican-American daughter,” she says. “Becoming an artist was a huge gamble. I felt like my parents had sacrificed so much that I should probably do something [more practical] with their sacrifices.” Today, her portraits have been exhibited across multiple states, but she hasn’t forgotten the struggles of her parents or the immigrant community in her hometown of Frisco, Texas. “I’m interested in the narratives that come out of the Latinx community and those who have a low socioeconomic status,” she says. “There’s a gap in the archive of documenting the experiences of poor people, and I’m kind of captivated by that.”
Diosdado trained as a formal portrait painter but has developed an increasingly abstract approach to her subjects. One recent portrait, Nobody in a Swamp, conveys the difficulty of navigating different identities while mired by societal expectations. The central figure, obscured by green and blue reed-like ribbons, Diosdado modeled on herself, but it is meant to represent anyone who has to “wade through” the murky waters of life in America. Diosdado used to work as a museum docent, explaining art to visitors, but she now thinks it is “less interesting for other people to be super clear on the meaning of my paintings. I think of my art in general as being pretty open-ended in terms of its symbols,” she says. “When I’m painting, I’m thinking of it as a Rorschach test to really get at the shifting nature of the Latinx identity and how multifaceted it is.”
