In Place of Memory

This collection of artwork is an exploration of a place experienced and yet unknown. I was conceived in Brownsville, Texas (a Rio Grande Valley city on the border with Mexico) and then adopted in 1982. Growing up in Houston with my adoptive parents, I never knew my biological family or the place I “came from.” In 2021, I started pondering this experience with five art pieces — Store, Bridge, Chaperone, Hotel, and School. These small works combined monotype prints of places in Brownsville that I had never seen in person, drawn from photographs taken by other people. Onto these prints, I collaged photos of myself as a child.

At the end of 2022, I visited Brownsville for the first time on a family trip with my husband and two children. Since then, I have created larger mixed media pieces using my photographs from this trip, drawings, paintings of my children, and — once again — public domain photographs taken by people I’ve never met. These works play with and meld several dichotomies — real and imagined, childhood and parenthood, past and present, self and family, “my place” and “not my place.”