Carolina Jiménez

Carolina Jiménez is a textile artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Drawing on her heritage as a first generation Mexican-American, She creates monuments, woven paintings and wall sculptures that act as memory signifiers of mundane moments. The constructions become vessels into which the past is poured, molded, or reshaped (woven, unraveled, or stretched). Her work seeks to magnify the banal moments of daily life, making valuable the sometimes unseen acts of maintenance, softness, and care.

 

Her practice acts as a tether to the past and present histories of diasporic migration. While the works are abstract, they can be understood as love letters to Rosa Mexicano, sweet mangoes and kind women on the street, to the dappled light under a jacaranda tree, and a mother’s embrace. They are meditations on the creation of family apart from the traditions that bind us to them.

 

Jiménez’s connection to textiles stems from the discipline’s embodiment of labor and material knowledge. Through this medium, she emphasizes the material history of fiber and dyes, and explores how their stories of colonization, trade, and community reverberate into the present day. Working on a floor loom, she weaves textiles that seem suspended in a state of becoming. Yarns are dyed with flowers, bark and bugs, echoing the traditional techniques found in her family’s home state of Chiapas.

 

Carolina Jiménez (b. 1991, Riverside, CA) received her BArch from Syracuse University (2014) and an MFA in Textile Design at Rhode Island School of Design (2018). She has held solo and group exhibitions internationally including Lobster Club, Los Angeles, CA; Alison Bradley Projects, New York, NY; JO-HS, Mexico City, Mexico; Bainbridge Museum of Art, Bainbridge, WA; and RISD Museum, Providence, RI. Her grants and awards include the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency, Bethany, CT; Museum Art and Design Artist Fellowship, New York, NY; Casa Lu Residency, Mexico City, Mexico; and Etvernal Residency, Brooklyn, NY. Jiménez lives and works in New York, NY.