[Calm street sounds, birds, light wind blowing] [tear paper] ANGELICA CONTRERAS: I am working on an alebrije and I'm currently giving some workshops for children and youth so they can learn this craft and I really like enjoy giving these workshops for kids.

I find it very liberating the way they create their own art.

It brings me back when I was a kid and I also like sharing the traditions of my country with them.

[music] I'm originally from Whittier, California, but I grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico.

I've been here living in Madison for the last eight years.

I grew up in a bicultural household.

I have a Mexican heritage from my mom's side, and my dad was Mexican American.

I kind of remember living in basically two cultures.

A lot of what I've been doing here in Madison talks about that experience of what it's like to live in two cultures and how our identity is shaped through that.

Identities made out of layers.

[music ends] [paper shuffling] I started collecting scraps of paper when I was very young.

My family used to collect just a lot of things, so the medium of collage, I started developing that when I was very young.

In fact, I have one that's really old that when I was about six or seven years old that I kept.

Not thinking that the medium that I was going to use was going to be collage, but somehow that happened because I started collecting scraps of paper and I guess I made a connection that I could use it in my artwork.

But now I kind of look for very specific things that might have a symbolic meaning to them.

I have a lot of, we call them Mexico Laminas that are used in schools that are about a specific topic and there's like thousands of them, so I really like those graphics and I like to incorporate those.

Also from traveling and just walking around the streets of these big cities, I found very interesting to see the walls and how these walls were layered with either graffiti, publicity, and just any other thing and they were kind of free for all that people would just add and add more things and sometimes with time they would come down.

So it was kind of these, in Spanish we say cadaver esquisito exquisite cadaver that was a work that was made out of just people layering things, but I found that very interesting.

And when I came to Madison and thinking about how identity is developed and how living in two cultures or three cultures, how that is shaped, I think that medium of collage and layering slowly incorporated into my work.

[music] The name of this piece is Duality.

This painting is inspired in one of Deanne Arbes' famous portraits of the twins.

Although they were twins, they were very different.

I've seen that when I talk with my students.

I think they're more open to share where they come from than instead of just assimilating and hiding it.

This piece is called La Carga.

La Carga talks about being a caretaker and what people go through and all the things that they're responsible for.

And sometimes people don't realize it.

The task of having to care for others and how sometimes it's not seen.

This piece is going to be called Todos Mis Muertos.

And this particular piece talks about the issues right now in Mexico in general of disappearance of people, whether there's women, men, children in very alarming rates.

Some of the figures are from the news.

And banners, posters of people that write, that don't forget me, I'm missing.

What motivates me to create art is we tend to just see people or things just from the outside, like the first impression.

We don't stop and see commonalities.

[music ends]