Background Report - Arizona Town Hall

Cristina Cárdenas was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, where she studied architecture at
the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO). Cárdenas
pursued further training at the Universidad de Guadalajara under Francisco Caracalla and
Jorge Martínez, former assistants to muralist José Clemente Orozco. Her draftsmanship,
iconography, artistic forms, color, and styles are derived from Mexican neo-figurative
expressionism in combination with the academic training she received in the United States,
where she studied painting and printmaking with Luis Jimenez, Robert Colescott, Bruce
McGrew, and Bailey Doogan at the University of Arizona. Cárdenas earned a Master of Fine
Arts degree in printmaking in 1990, and has lived and worked in Tucson for over two decades.
Her large and small-scale paintings, lithographs, and monoprints disrupt stereotypes
of gender, religion, and culture. More recently she has incorporated photographs and digital
images of historical subjects and self-portraits in works on fine art paper and wood panel
surfaces. For the last decade, she has also used bark/amate paper produced by the Otomi
Indians of San Pablito, Puebla, Mexico. A textured bark paper made using pre-Hispanic
methods, amate provides a historical link to her Mexican indigenous roots. Cárdenas
combines amate with assorted media such as acrylic and gouache paints, dry pigments, gold
leaf, and printmaking techniques. She uses modern techniques on ancient surfaces to create
new representations of female archetypes derived from classical Mexican antiquity,
contemporary interpretations of female saints, and intimate (auto)biographical portraits of
womanhood and motherhood. Her work also explores the experience of unnamed or unknown
immigrant subjects from the perspective of a woman artist born in Mexico who lives in a
border zone. Her art engages the simultaneous challenges of belonging to a cultural
community and forming an individual identity.
D. Bryon Darby has been photographing the ever-changing landscape of the West for the
past decade. A life-long inhabitant of the desert, Bryon was raised in Northern Utah where he
received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic design from Utah State University. Since completing
his undergraduate degree in the spring of 2001, Bryon has supported himself as a
commercial artist in the advertising and editorial fields. Presently, he is working on a public
art commission with the Phoenix Office of Cultural Affairs while finishing his Master of Fine
Arts in Photography at Arizona State University. His current work explores ideas about the
power of place on personal experience while expanding on notions of culture and landscape.
Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that
responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight. In 2010, she premiered
Water Sky Garden at the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, and in 2009, she completed the
largest public art commission in the United States that year, Her Secret is Patience, in
Phoenix. This sculpture was recognized by a Public Art Network, Year in Review Award that
same year. Her art has been presented in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Lithuania, India, Japan,
Indonesia, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. She graduated from Harvard
and completed graduate degrees in psychology and painting. About the art work: Suspended
above the two-city-block Civic Space Park, the sculpture is monumental yet soft, fixed in
place but constantly in motion, it dances gently in the air, choreographed by the flux of desert
winds. The large three-dimensional multi-layered net form is created by a combination of
hand-baited and machine-loomed knotting, and is the result of a collaborative effort with an
international team of award-winning aeronautical and mechanical engineers, architects,
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