MATRIX 282 / Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido presents the artist’s textile drawings and sculptural installations. Based between San Diego and Tijuana, Rosas considers the complexities of the border region by drawing from colonial histories, familial traditions, and personal experience. Themes of inheritance and intergenerational knowledge recur in Rosas’s work alongside references to single motherhood. The artist adopts embroidery skills learned from her mother, grandmother, and aunts, often using her young son’s drawings as foundations on which to layer, stitch, and build. Incorporating natural pigments and collage, Rosas combines these inventive images with historical imagery to evoke the collision and circulation of cultures.

Rosas often engages with violent motifs of war and invasion—like military horses and weaponry—while simultaneously drawing our attention to their appearance as objects of child’s play. The slingshot is at once a weapon and a toy; a figure on horseback is both a soldier and a child playing make-believe. Rosas’s textile creations are frequently made in collaboration with her son, embroidered directly onto his drawings of superheroes and wrestlers. The exhibition’s title, Yo te cuido [I Take Care of You], foregrounds the ambivalence of such potent symbols and objects: an endearment expressing care, it is also a cautionary promise of protection. By understanding how colonialist images and actions are entrenched within our history, Rosas’s playful drawings and sculptures craft new ways of imagining the present.

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