BROCKTON, MASS.- In 2017, Mano-Made debuted in Los Angeles at the Craft in America Center as a trio of solo exhibitions curated by Director Emily Zaiden. This landmark show—in conjunction with the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative—featured work by Mexican-Californian craft pioneers Jaime Guerrero, Gerardo Monterrubio, and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, all of whom use craft media to articulate messages about American culture, personal experiences, Latino identity, and the ever-mutating socio-political tensions that exist in Los Angeles and California as a whole.

Fuller Craft Museum’s presentation of Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists exhibits all three artists together for the first time.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood is renowned for her textiles and installations that reflect her background as a migrant agricultural worker. Underwood often integrates traditional Huichol weaving into her large mixed-media textiles, illustrating the lives of migrant workers and other marginalized individuals. As she states, “My work is a reflection of personal border experiences: the interconnectedness of societies, insisting on beauty in struggle, and celebrating the notion of ‘seeing’ this world through my tri-cultural lens.”

Underwood taught at San Jose State University. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Diego State University and M.F.A. from San Jose State University. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of Art. This year Underwood was elected as a Fellow of the American Craft Council.

Gerardo Monterrubio was born in Oaxaca, Mexico. After obtaining a BFA in Ceramic Arts from California State University, Long Beach, he received his MFA from UCLA and currently teaches at Long Beach City College. His work is in the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, MA), and various private collections.

Monterrubio’s work is influenced by murals, prison drawings, graffiti art, and old etchings. His narratives delve into the dark corners of the Mexican immigrant experience and contemporary street culture of Los Angeles. As Monterrubio states, “Altered by the imagination, memory, and the like, my work engages the idea of recording selected aspects of contemporary society, in methods that are as old and universal as human creativity itself.”

Jaime Guerrero was born in Los Angeles, California. He began his studies at California College of Art and Crafts, then attended the Pilchuck School of Glass and studied with Venetian glass artists Checco Ongaro, Pino Signoretto, and studio glass pioneer Benjamin Moore.

Guerrero utilizes glass to reflect on the human experience—addressing issues of social inequality—often times in relation to urban and Latino culture. Guerrero uses concepts both of the ancient world and contemporary society in his work.

He has been nominated for the Corning Award, has received two Saxe Fellowship Awards (2006 and 2012), and the People’s Choice Award (2012) through the Bay Area Glass Institute in San Jose, CA—for a piece now residing in the Oakland Museum of California. In 2013, the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame gave him his first solo museum exhibition Torpor.