Maria Maea is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, film and sound. Through her art practice, she deepens her connection to land, somatic memory, and ancestry. Her works investigate and celebrate her experience growing up in Southern California in her family’s Samoan Mexican American community. Both a traditional medium in Samoan craft culture and an invasive species growing throughout Los Angeles, the palm features prominently in Maea’s work, speaking to the resilience of those forced to uproot their lives in the wake of colonization and their ability to thrive in new, often hostile environments. She engages with these plants through craft by creating vessels, shoes, and abstracted bodies, at times woven together with different organic elements and cast on her own body and on those of family members. By using materials that will deteriorate and decay and by focusing on collaborative making with her family and friends, the artist proposes a practice that challenges the fetishization of objects frozen in time, presenting us with a practice that understands deterioration, mutation, and change as part of the work, just as they are part of life. 

Artist talk: Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. in 1003 Cruess Hall. Following the public lecture will be a community gathering.

This event is free and open to the public.

The organizers of this event would like to express their gratitude to Dr. Elizabeth Freeman, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her outstanding leadership in the college, Dr. Freeman is professor of English specializing in American literature as well as gender/sexuality/queer studies. She is the author of three books from Duke University Press: The Wedding Complex (2002); Time Binds (2010); and Beside You in Time (2019) and is co-editor of Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (2022). Her appointment as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Davis began in July, 2019 and ends in June, 2024. 

The talk is supported by the Elizabeth Freeman Fund and the AB540 Undocumented Student Center and co-sponsored by the College of Letters and Science and the Departments of Art and Art History, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies and Spanish and Portuguese.