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Artist Yvette Mayorga’s phone case is the palest pink and bears an image of that unmistakably mid-2000s relic: a BlackBerry screen and keyboard. “A Bratz BlackBerry,” she corrects me, proudly.
It’s on brand for this rapidly ascending artist, whose works predominate with punchy pink and are grounded in her personal and familial histories as a child of Mexican immigrants raised in the Midwest during the ’90s and ’00s. Mayorga’s elaborately frosted compositions lure viewers into a maximalist world where 18th-century Rococo meets a Y2K teen-bedroom dreamscape and the Latinx experience in the US. Her works have been festooned with the likes of false eyelashes, jeweled acrylic nails, plastic nail charms, Telfar bags, cake toppers, Louis Vuitton monogram patterns, bags of Cheetos and Takis, angel figurines, gummy worms, donuts, McDonald’s fries, Nike Cortezes and Air Jordans, and Tweety Bird.
But Mayorga’s eye-catching confections are anything but saccharine. Embedded in the cheery, sugary-sweet aesthetics are the darker realities of pursuing the American dream, with oblique commentary on gender, immigration, consumerism, labor, and belonging. Toy soldiers and immigration agents patrol at the edges and under staircases in her Surveillance Locket series, which riffs on the Polly Pocket compacts she yearned for as a child. The 2020 installation “Monuments of the Forgotten” featured donated shoes decorated with her signature frosting as a remembrance of those who have died in their attempts to cross the southern US border. The nails on a ceramic hand in her Protest Fingers series spell “F* ICE.”
And the maximalist, OTT style often adopted by working-class Latina and Black girls and women is political in itself, as author Jillian Hernandez argues in her 2020 book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment. “Aesthetics of excess embrace abundance where the political order would impose austerity upon the racialized poor and working class…. [Black and Latinx women] flaunt the visibility of difference where the social order invests in the material erasure of Black and Latinx bodies through mass incarceration, detention, deportation, and other forms of social death.”
Continuing to prove that a spoonful of sugar can indeed make challenging topics easier to digest, Mayorga has just opened her first East Coast solo museum presentation, “Dreaming of You,” at Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. It includes paintings and sculptures made over the last seven years alongside new works.
Her process involves applying acrylic paints using pastry-shop tools like piping bags and Russian tips to achieve luscious textures. Mayorga began experimenting with frosting around 2012 as a more exciting alternative to painting; for early works, she sourced leftover frosting from bakeries, before a decomposing series during her undergraduate years led her to seek materials with more longevity. (She’s admitted to at times secretly spraying her work to smell like real frosting.) But the unconventional method became a means to address labor and family: Her mother worked as a baker and cake decorator in Chicago’s historic Marshall Field’s department store in the 1970s before raising five kids full-time.
Mayorga concedes baking is not in her own wheelhouse, and she’s gleaned decorating techniques from baking shows like Cake Boss and Nailed It! and Instagram tutorials. “My Instagram Explore page is cake decorating, Hello Kitty, and nails,” she says, smiling, during a break from installing the Aldrich show.
Caitlin Monachino, the Aldrich’s curatorial and publications manager who organized the exhibition, found herself drawn to the accessibility of Mayorga’s work. “There are so many different points of entry—on a superficial level there’s the immediacy of the striking pink palette and texture,” Monachino says. “But the more time you spend with the works, the more you see the more sinister stories come out in very subtle details. It forces you to spend time with the work. She’s using this very approachable visual language to talk about harder subjects.”
The new Aldrich exhibition overlaps with the final month of Mayorga’s first solo museum presentation, “What a Time to Be,” at the Momentary, the contemporary art space of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, up through October 15. Both shows reflect a recent turn toward portraiture. “For the Momentary, that was the first time in a while that I had painted these representational portraits of my family members, whereas the work before was more abstract,” Mayorga says.
The three new larger-than-life portraits of her siblings at the Aldrich were inspired by 18th-century German artist Martin Engelbrecht’s engravings of workers decked out in the tools and wares of their trade—in particular, the confectioner, baker, and porcelain maker. Mayorga’s work often incorporates references to Rococo art, an interest that can be traced to tchotchkes in her family’s Midwestern home; the lavish celebrations and quinceañeras of her youth; and the ornate, gilded churches from annual summer trips to visit family in Mexico’s Jalisco and Zacatecas states. “The Catholic church was my first art museum,” she has said.
“I’ve been continuing on the path of intervening in art history to include Brown stories, or these histories that have not been represented, and having these two times and places collide,” Mayorga says, pointing out that Walt Disney was likewise inspired by Rococo art. However, the difference between Engelbrecht’s portraits and hers, she explains, is her subjects’ professions are “an afterthought—they do not become their labor. It’s a commentary on class and how Latinx people are seen and tied to specific labor.”
Mayorga’s fascination with pink began with Mexican pink, a color that has come to be seen as representative of Mexican culture and identity and has made its way into Mexican and Latinx neighborhoods in the US. Today she sees the hue as helping her reclaim overlooked narratives related to craft labor and gendered labor. “Pink has always been the underdog, the color that gets forgotten or that people don’t think has as much power.”
Rococo, likewise, struggled to be taken seriously in its day, condemned by Enlightenment thinkers as indecent and immoral. “It was seen as frivolous, a time of excess and indulgence,” Mayorga says. “So it makes sense for pink and Rococo to be powerful in my world, a tool of seduction to draw people in and then force them to sit with the work and find out what it’s about.” She was amused to see the color stage a comeback this summer, buoyed by the film Barbie: “It’s so intriguing that a color and a gendered toy could have so much backlash. It really speaks to pink’s power and potential.”
Mayorga turned to the color again to design a wallpaper for the Aldrich exhibition featuring Hello Kitty, cherry emojis, cartoon eyes, flip phones, butterflies, seashells, cherubs, and fairy-tale castles. Growing up, she wanted to be an interior designer and was an avid viewer of HGTV. “It was a space to dream of what my home’s potential could be,” she says.
Today she seeks to create an immersive feeling around her works and, for an installation at the Momentary, even reimagined her teenage bedroom, complete with a laptop, television, the teen magazine J-14, and a gilded duvet all covered in pink frosting. (No surprise she names large-scale-installation artist Pepón Osorio among her inspirations, along with Nick Cave, Doris Salcedo, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Mike Kelley.)
Mayorga is the first artist in her family, and her parents are proud and supportive. “I didn’t know any artists growing up,” she notes. “None of us really knew what being an artist looked like. Being first-gen, some of that pressure was taken off, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’”
Later this year, Mayorga, who is based in Chicago, will unveil a large-scale installation at O’Hare International Airport, part of the city’s largest single acquisition of art made by Chicagoans in the last three decades, in addition to showing at Miami’s Untitled Art Fair in December and Mexico City’s Material Art Fair in February. “My parents are now starting to understand what being an artist is,” she continues. “And it’s amazing to be able to bring them into these spaces that normally we wouldn’t have access to or maybe feel comfortable in. So that’s my biggest proud moment too.”
“Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” is on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, through March 17, 2024.
