We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cielo Zuñiga a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Cielo, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
For me success is in finding community. There’s nothing that you can fail at that will make you feel lost with a community to fall back on. Whether that be family or friends, artists or people in your field, a community is an integral part of my fulfillment as a person. Many times throughout my life my family and I had had to rely on others in our community for everyday necessities, transportation, and in extreme cases, even groceries. And every time, someone would show up for us, no questions asked. So whenever we had the means to provide that support for others, we did. It’s because of this that I believe in the power of community support and solidarity. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to surround myself with people that feel the same way and show up for others the way they expect us to show up for them. I feel like I’ve “made it” just because of that. Never underestimate the power finding a community can have on your development as an artist. When you know you can count on somebody no matter what, everything else feels easier.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Cielo Zuñiga, a mixed-media textile artist and creative from Edinburg, a small border town in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. My art explores my relationship with grief, love, impermanence, and identity. I use fibers as a way to create tangible representations of these concepts; they set the atmosphere for intimate relationships with the work I make, while hand embroidery and mending create a meditative, repetitive process through which I can reconcile with the subject matter. There is a unique intersection between borderland communities and our relationship with impermanence that shapes the way we view the world. I explore that intersection as a child of immigrants and as an artista fronteriza.
My interest in art began through photography. First, the casual documentation of family gatherings and candid moments, then an interest in still life as a way to express feelings of loneliness and love, which led to an obsession with conceptual photography. I’d write stories and poems, then stage the scene to get the perfect accompanying shot. It was through photography that I became interested in writing and storytelling. Conveying a story through a photograph quickly became a driving force for my work behind the camera. But, after a while, I felt that a single photo wasn’t enough to capture the full story. My interest shifted towards filmmaking. Filmmaking became a huge passion of mine so I decided to take film classes at my local university. I directed my first crew for a short film race and even got more involved as a photographer for a theater club during my time at the university. I was starting to feel things falling into place for me as I prepared for my first trip to South America as a photographer/videographer for this theatre club. Unfortunately, that feeling was short-lived. The day before we boarded the plane to Colombia the university announced they were shutting down operations due to COVID. Then the nationwide shutdown began, which halted all momentum in my creative life. After that, an unsolvable issue with FAFSA came up for me, and I was unable to return to school. It seemed like everything was going wrong, I wasn’t able to pick up the camera in any meaningful way for almost a year.
The pandemic brought feelings of loneliness and a strong desire to be a part of a creative community. When I did start shooting again, I noticed my eye had changed, I was trying to tell the same story through a different lens. I had become obsessed with fashion and editorial-style photography, I love the creative expression infused in every facet of the photoshoots I saw on magazine pages. From makeup to set design to the expressive poses to the way it all was put together. My interest in makeup and fashion as a storytelling device grew from here. I began to work with makeup and collage as a way to express the feelings of frustration and confusion I was having with my identity and place in the world. Collage-making gave me the liberty to be more thoughtful in my composition while simultaneously allowing me to be playful and experiment with different materials. I loved the sense of accomplishment that I received after finishing a piece, being able to hold it in my hands made the effort seem more real, in a way.
My love for tactile art only grew from here, I researched new ways to transfer my photos onto different mediums, graduating from paper to fabric. I started with screen printing, experimenting with freehand designs, and then learning how to expose my images to print on clothes. Working on fabric revealed an appreciation for hand sewing and embroidery that helped me slow down and process my emotions. I found these mediums to be meditative in practice, where I felt no pressure to be precise while still having the power to be detailed. All the ideas that had been brewing in the back of my mind for years started to seem possible for the first time.
It was around this time that I applied and got into my first fellowship, a momentous experience that catapulted me into the most creatively fulfilling moments of my life. Sembramos y Florecemos, a virtual fellowship from Voces Unidas, opened many doors for me and gave me the push I needed to bring all my previous ideas to life. I was experimenting with combining my favorite mediums, something I’ve always enjoyed. I worked with video again, put together a zine collage, started a textile book, and picked up photography again. Through the connections I made during this fellowship, I went on to collaborate with local artists and finally break into the local art scene. I had applied to this fellowship as a last ditch effort to find some sort of connection with art outside of myself—what I found was community.
After this, I remained a frequent collaborator with Voces Unidas. So when they asked me and Alicia Garza to collaborate on an art installation piece for their event I immediately said yes. The event was on Day of the Dead, honoring the lives lost by the Rio Grande due to border militarization—including fauna and flora. Alicia and I created a mixed media collage tapestry—River of Remembrance—of about 10 by 11 feet in size, the biggest I’ve worked on yet. This piece quickly became a very personal conversation with myself, as a child of immigrants who crossed that very river, and as an artist whose work reflected my community in many ways. It gave me the clarity I needed to start being more intentional with my art, making work that’s meaningful to me and reflects the person that I am and the lives I carry with me. This piece is currently on display at the Brownsville Performing Arts Academy in Brownsville, Texas.
Working on something as important as River of Remembrance gave me the drive to continue seeking ways to be involved in community artmaking. I applied to Trucha RGV’s Movimiento Screenprinting Fellowship and got accepted shortly after. The months leading up to my application, I had been going through a hard time, I had just lost my grandpa and was learning how to navigate life with grief. I had no idea how to process any of it, so I turned to art. I used this grief as a fuel to bring an idea I had been holding onto to life: a screen printed, textile animation made up of individual textile frames. I poured all of my confusion, my love, and my relationship with impermanence and loss into the creation of Amor Interminable. When I presented it to my family and friends at the Aligned Mind exhibition I was met with reciprocity and understanding. People resonated with my piece, it made me feel complex feelings of guilt and gratitude to my grandpa whose impact on me was the only reason I had pushed myself to express myself this way. But I realized the most fulfilling art I created was one that was deeply personal. This experience cemented in me the push for vulnerability and self-reflection in everything I do. It also provided the confidence I’d been lacking as an artist.
A couple months later I found myself at the Flower Shop Art Residency in Brownsville, Texas. I learned a lot from the artists around me, gave my first workshop and artist talk, and created my first large-scale cyanotype piece. The piece I worked on during my stay at the Flower Shop revolved around my childhood home and the stories that it holds, told through a childlike lens of wonder and nostalgia. Continuing to deconstruct my experiences in life through art has helped me understand why I gravitate towards the tactile arts like collage and embroidery. My first art residency proved to be a journey of growth and introspection, I now feel much more confident as an artist (and a person, in general). The friendships and connections forged through this experience have already inspired me to branch out to new mediums, I’m currently experimenting with soft sculpture as a way to bring my textile work into the 3D world. The momentum from the past two years is still going strong, every day I feel more passionate about the art I’m making and the stories I’m telling, I can’t wait to continue my self-discovery through artmaking.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Being creative allows me to connect with people in a way I didn’t realize I could until very recently. As an artist, I process things through my craft, which empowers me to create physical manifestations of my experiences. When I’m creating, though, I’m not thinking about whether or not my work is relatable or even a shared experience, I’m only focused on communicating my story through my art. So it was a genuine surprise to me when, after spending months processing my grief through Amor Interminable, a textile animation about surrendering ourselves to grief as a neverending testament to love, I was approached by an almost overwhelming amount of people who empathized with my experience and saw themselves in my work. It felt so rewarding to receive those messages of gratitude for my rendition of grief because while creating those pieces I felt so alone in my experience, I had no idea how many people would identify with my art. This is why I believe in creating personal art, about things you’ve lived through and experienced. There is something so special about unintentionally creating art that resonates with people and I hope to continue doing so for as long as I can.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
There’s no other end goal for me than to keep making art that people like my parents can see themselves in. Earlier this year, in January, I had my first group exhibition at a museum I’d never been to, and I was nervous about seeing my art on the walls of a place I’d never thought I’d show my art in. There’s a feeling of illegitimacy that comes with being a child of an immigrant, which is only heightened by being an artist, too. I was also nervous about inviting my family and relatives to the opening, I assumed they’d think it was too fancy and wouldn’t come since they always found art confusing. But it wasn’t until everyone showed up for me, my family in the museum hallways, recognizing parts of my pieces that I was scared they’d be confused by, that I realized how much I wanted them to see more of themselves in the art on these walls. How can we expect people who haven’t been taught anything about art to enjoy it when they can’t recognize anything they see? Seeing my grandma, who had never stepped foot in an art museum before, smiling and pointing as she saw herself in my art healed something inside me. I want more of that.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://crehar.myportfolio.com/
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- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@creharphoto