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Inspired by Mexican mythological and folk traditions, colorful paintings by Karima Muyaes will be displayed in the gallery of Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts from Sunday, Feb. 4 through March 9. Her recent exhibitions include a September show at the Boudreau-Ruiz Gallery, Newport Beach, Calif.
The artist will discuss the exhibit, titled “Reflexiones del color,” at a brown bag lunch from noon-1 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 28, in Williams Center room 108. Lunch may be brought or purchased for $3.
A reception for the artist will be held from 3-5 p.m. Sunday, March 4, at the Williams Center. It is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Born in Mexico City in 1960, Muyaes studied fine arts at the University of the Americas in Mexico City and at the Toronto School of Art. She studied etching and lithography at Open Studio, Toronto; design and drawing at George Brown College, Toronto; and serigraphy at the School of Design, Mexico City. Muyaes draws on her earliest memories of being surrounded by mythical masks and primitive influences. Using a contemporary application, the artist transfers her impressions of the cycle of life to canvas, using bold colors that have a language of their own. Her work is described as a “spiritual walk filled with sensual and audacious images, forms, and textures.”
“I believe that my creative process has evolved parallel to my own growth as a woman,” she said in an interview with the director of Galeria La Mano Magica. “Yet the essence of the process has always been to express any feeling that moves me enough to want to create a visual form, without regard to classical norms or routes marked by others. In my artwork, I feel a liberation of my being that is almost unconscious, in which there is no room for any kind of external limitation or restriction, except possibly those that I self-impose.”
Muyaes has been featured in many individual exhibitions in Mexico City, Oaxcaca, and Tijuana, Mexico since 1987, and at Lafayette’s Experimental Printmaking Institute in 1997. Her work has been included in over 40 collective exhibitions at the University of the Americas, the Picasso Gallery, the American School, the National Printmaking Museum, the Azcapotzalco Cultural Center, and other Mexico City galleries; the Museum of Art, Santiago, Chile; Zitlala Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and York University, the Toronto School of Art, and the NAFAA Gallery, Toronto. Her work also was represented in a 1999 show at the Experimental Printmaking Institute. She won first place in the 1982 Etching Competition at the Toronto School of Art, and honorary mention in Modern Interpretations of Don Quijote at the National Printmaking Museum in Mexico City.
Gallery hours are noon-5 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday; and 2-5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call the gallery at 610-330-5361 or email artgallery@lafayette.edu.
The exhibition series is presented under provisions of the Detwiller Endowment. The gallery is funded in part through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.