By Devon Rudolph

Headlining the show are twelve talented artists along with two exhibitions curated by local high school and teen groups. Dating back to 1984, the biennial show continues to serve as a springboard for local contemporary artists. Griselda Rosas, an artist living on the US-Mexico border, has created her collection with the help of her son and embroidery learned from the women in her family tree. She conveys unique challenges living between two cultures and the ‘monsters’ it can create, with many of these ugly creatures pictured in her work. 

Griselda Rosas’s large mixed media works on paper, representing Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, were among the fair’s show stoppers. Rosas somehow combines the textures of paint with densely stitched or embroidered passages. The pieces are moody, atmospheric, full of surprises, and downright mystical in the way that they usher thread into the shimmery realm of fabulist landscapes. The artist, based in Tijuana and San Diego, straddles the US-Mexico border, and her stitching on paper can echo the back and forth, coming and going, of migration. In the far edge of one piece is a tear Rosas sutured. The divide is a wound; the wound needs repair. 

The title of Griselda Rosas' exhibition, "Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before)," recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, "Once upon a time...," but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn't frame so much as foreground the action depicted there. Which is slightly ironic because the works Rosas has created—in watercolor, embroidery, collage, and other materials—are vessels for a volatile chemistry of color and texture that variously congeal, smolder, and sublimate into a nebulous array of babies, battles, conquistadores, vortexes, regalia, insignia, animals and tissues. 

The title of Griselda Rosas’ exhibition, “Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before),” recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, “Once upon a time…,” but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn’t frame so much as foreground the action depicted there.  The works Rosas has created here—in watercolor, embroidery, collage and other materials—are vessels for a volatile chemistry of color and texture that variously congeal, smolder and sublimate into a nebulous array of babies, battles, conquistadors, vortexes, regalia, insignia, animals and tissues. Alive, or in some transitional necrosis, they remain highly resistant to the perspective offered by narrative. 

Two floors down is a solo show of recent work by Griselda Rosas, an artist from Tijuana, whose work engages storytelling in very different ways. The two artists hail from different countries, different regions of the border and different generations. Where Álveraz Muñoz uses the more oblique language of conceptualism, Rosas is preoccupied by craft. 

LA JOLLA, Cali.—Born in Tijuana in 1977, artist Griselda Rosas has her ear to the ground on both sides of the California-Mexico border, listening intently to the eternal stories of conquest, colonization, and conversation. The stories flow into drawings and sculptures, multilayered imagery in which thread, paint, and collage combine to create an almost archeological presentation of hybrid cultures and histories. 

There are many stories within the works in "Yo te cuido," each unique, provocative and vibrant in their own way. The title of the exhibition translates to "I care for you." One seemingly common theme within the works is Rosas' exploration of what she calls "ancestral memory" — the idea that the colonialist histories of the Americas is something that still informs our everyday lives, both genetically and sociologically. 

A new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego draws on experience living in a borderland. Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido is the artist's first solo museum exhibition and will present both sculptural installations and textile drawings inspired by inheritance and inter-generational knowledge.

The title of San Diego-Tijuana artist Griselda Rosas' first solo museum show, "Yo te cuido," translates to "I take care of you." It's a nod to her entire artistic practice, structured primarily around the restrictions and inspirations of raising a son.

It has already been a busy year for Griselda Rosas.
Her work is on display across the county, at Balboa Park’s San Diego Art Institute, the Oceanside Museum of Art and the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas. She is now preparing to open a show in May at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Gallery in La Jolla with her three 2019 San Diego Art Prize co-finalists. And in October, she will have a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in conjunction with a retrospective on artist Yolanda López.

Prolific transborder mixed-media artist Griselda Rosas lets place and migration economics inform her work — on view in four different shows in February and Griselda Rosas is, it seems, suddenly everywhere. And so is her work. The San Diego Art Prize finalist's broad repertoire — from large hanging sculptures suspended from ropes to mixed media pieces she embroiders at her kitchen table after her son goes to sleep — is specifically inspired and informed by place. The origins of the materials she uses and where they've traveled to seem as important to her as the shapes they take in her works.