Wanda Ortiz

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo: It has been a while since we last talked. Where are you at this moment? I do not mean this literally, but in a felt way.

Wanda Ortiz: Yes, it has been quite some time! I am really, really tired. Emotionally exhausted. Definitely running on fumes since March 2020.

NDERE: You posted several weeks ago about the day you left the Bronx for Florida. This sounded like a significant shift in your life. Would you be willing to expand on this milestone?

WO: In NYC, I felt as if I was spinning my wheels in the mud—working way too many hours a week in order to make rent and enough money to basically survive. Making art was really hard to do when supplies were super scarce and hardly disposable. It was a really intense time for me.

NDERE: How is it for you to be physically away from the Bronx, creatively speaking? I know this place holds meaning for many of us.

WO: Moving away provided a much needed change of pace, scenery, reliable income stream and, most of all, the TIME and QUIET needed for reflection and growth of my work. NYC Diasporican life fed the bulk of my work, but it was always so fast paced; the work was instinctual. I can breathe differently here. The work took radical turns upon returning here.

NDERE: Tell me about your Goddesses. Where and who are you in this exploration?

WO: Las Reinas are facets of my psyche manifested in human form. Each is rooted in personal trauma that I yearned to better understand.

NDERE: I recall talking religion with you during the George W. Bush era. We were in a group at a diner in the Bronx. The conversation suggested that religion, in a general way, was on the verge of being dismissed. I contradicted that view, foreseeing the role of religion in the decades to come. Why your interest in the Pietà? How did you get involved with it?

WO: I was raised in the Catholic church, and while I no longer practice it, I am still impacted by its grandeur, spectacle, and ceremony. It seemed like the most fitting way to address communal and parental grief, loss, lives interrupted, and safe space. I thought so much about Mary and her knowledge of her son’s fate and inability to stop it and reflected on that feeling, as a brown mother to a brown child. It is impossible for me to completely shield my child from feeling injustice, ostracization, judgment or fear because of their skin. This feeling stretched out to the long line of brown parents and brown children. This fear amplified across our communities, all the while being told to “get over it,” “you already had a Black president, what more do you want,” “slavery ended,” “racism doesn’t exist anymore,” etc. These are crushing added blows that compound the pain felt in the community—the fear to let our guard down long enough to grieve at our own pace.

NDERE: The Goddesses, the Pietà, what about moving to the center of this and discussing the Mother? Rather than asking or pointing in any direction, I will open this space for you to guide me through.

WO: I was guided by the intense feeling of wanting to provide comfort to people. Sometimes the only thing you crave is to curl up in strong, comforting arms and be held. I thought about the resignation in Michelangelo’s Pieta Madonna’s face as her son’s body lay draped across her lap. I grew up with a replica of this sculpture on my mother’s dresser, her huge bible nearby. I thought about intense grief, so deep that tears simply are not enough.

I wanted to create a figure that was regal, that felt monumental, architectural (think the Greek Caryatids), strong enough to hold the world but supple enough to curl into for safety. I wanted folks to feel enveloped in the warmth and security we tend to think of when we think of maternal love.

NDERE: My understanding is that you conceive of many of your creative actions as performance. If this is correct, what is performance for you and why are you in it?

WO: I guess that’s the only word I could use to describe these actions that I make. Performance [art] for me seems to be where by body is the studio; a place where I can stretch past painting or drawing and create interactive spaces where the stories I would like to tell can be experienced in real time. For a long time, I felt compelled to close the space between the viewer and myself and have lived experiences shared together. Not so much these days.

NDERE: I do not know about you, but there have been times when art has pushed me to the edge and made me ill instead of healing me. I have personally learned to make a distinction between art and creativity.  What would you have to say about this?

WO: I do agree with you. I have set out to make works that are supposed to be cleansing, but I have been left feeling stripped, raw, and laden with the weight of others. I have learned that it is probably no longer safe for me to do this many more times anymore.

NDERE: There is great fear of aging in the Arts. Especially for mothers, women, and performance artists whose bodies are usually on the front line. Where do you envision yourself 30 years from now? Would you be willing to paint us an image with words?

WO: Funny you mention this, because I think I am hanging up my performance gloves for a while. I want to make more objects, drawings. Things that I can spend more time on in studio without pushing my body and family too hard. This is most important to me these days. I am more committed to being with my family than being in front of people the way I was for a large chunk of my career. I need to be there for my little one. Time evaporates so quickly now — I want to make work that lasts instead of evaporating with equal quickness. I am also thinking of my art estate, leaving something tangible for my progeny once I am gone.

But I am stubborn and longevity is in my blood. No me voy pa’ ningun lado todavia. Just going back to where I started. Painting and drawing, probably.

NDERE: Are there any messages or words you would like to close this conversation with? Go ahead.

WO: I am grateful for the kind of solidarity found in our cohort. Even if ages of time pass, we can find comfort and support in each other. I am leaning into being considered an elder in the field more and more, earning my grey hairs, wrinkles, bad knees, and back pain. It is not as terrible as I thought. I feel good about what I’ve made so far and what I can share with the younger generation, si les gusta. But long ago, I understood that my work isn’t for everyone and have become comfortable in the fringes, haciendo travesuras, locuras y meditaciones sobre cosas que me importan.

I am grateful to still call you friend, mi Super Merengue!

Wanda Ortiz (B. 1973) is a nationally and internationally recognized, award winning interdisciplinary visual and performance artist. Her most recent works, Wig Variants, debuted at the A&H Museum in Maitland, Florida. Her project, Exodus|Pilgrimage debuted in 2019 at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center in Orlando. In 2017 Pieta debuted at the Knowles Memorial Chapel at Rollins College and was presented as part of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s IDENTIFY: Performance as Portraiture series.  

Ortiz is a 2020 Anonymous Was A Woman nominee. She was awarded a UCF 2018 Woman of Distinction Award, UCF LIFE award, 2018 Research Incentive Award; 2016 Franklin Furnace award; nominated for the 2016 United States Artist Fellowship; and named one of 2016 Woman Making History honoree by UCF’s Center for Success of Women Faculty. She was a 2016 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition semifinalist; top ten finalist for the statewide 2015 Orlando Museum of Art Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, FA; 2008 Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art Ralph Bunche Fellow; AAS 1998 Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York; and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum, 2002. Selected exhibitions include Project 35: Last Call, Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia; The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Orlando; FL 2015, Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain 2010; American Chambers, Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwong City, South Korea; Performa 05 biennial, Artist Space, NY; The S Files 05; Artist in the Marketplace 25, Bronx Museum of the Arts; Mercury/Mercurio, Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos; and The L Factor, Exit Art, New York. Collections include The Orlando Museum of Art, FL; El Museo del Barrio, NY;  Jersey City Museum of Art, NJ; and private collections. Ortiz is an associate professor of Studio Art at the University of Central Florida

Wanda Ortiz related links: website / Instagram / Facebook