Yvette Mayorga
Pu$h Thru
Front & Back cover: Yvette Mayorga, La Ursupadora Not 4 Me (details), 2025
Yvette Mayorga Pu$h Thru
Monique Meloche Gallery
June 14 - July 26, 2025
Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker Essay by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas
Edited by Staci Boris
Photographed by Bob. Designed by Julia Marks
This catalogue was published on the occasion of Pu$h Thru, a solo exhibtion at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Yvette Mayorga: Pu$h Thru, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago renowned for her confection-inspired artworks that intertwine themes of immigration, identity, and feminized labor through a maximalist lens. Utilizing materials like acrylic piping applied with bakery tools—a nod to her mother's labor as a baker—Mayorga crafts opulent, Rococo-influenced pieces dominated by shades of pink to critically examine the American Dream and the Latinx experience, often borrowing compositions from personal and family photos and art history.
Pu$h Thru is Mayorga’s first solo show in Chicago since 2018 and reflects on the last decade of the artist’s life in the city. Showcasing a vibrant fusion of personal narrative, cultural critique, and aesthetic exploration, the works on view weave together a visual diary of protest, neighborhood scenes, and fleeting memories captured on the artist’s phone. Interspersed throughout are images from her family archive—snapshots of the artist as a child celebrating a birthday and sitting in her childhood living room—grounding the exhibition in ancestral history.
Mayorga, who is first generation Mexican American, engages deeply with the aesthetics of Rococo, specifically referencing 17th- and 18th-century painters like Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun. Staged portraits of the artist and her community adopt and remix Eurocentric narratives, offering a Latinx, feminist, and contemporary lens to center overlooked bodies and experiences. Pink, a color that has a long history with Mayorga’s practice, is deployed as a conceptual strategy to destabilize Western ideals of skin tone, evoking questions of race, class, and gendered embodiment while also referencing cosmetic and domestic aesthetics—an ironic and radical reclamation of softness as strength.
“Latinxoco,” a term coined by Mayorga, merges Latinx identity with Rococo aesthetics to elevate the Mexican American domestic spaces primarily in the Midwest. Drawing on Rococo’s history of intimate salons and ornate social settings, Mayorga connects this to Diasporic
cultural traditions—family celebrations, communal gatherings, and richly adorned homes, reclaiming decorative excess as a form of cultural memory.
Materially, the work is sculptural and immersive. Thick piped paint, “paint skins,” textiles, rhinestones, nail charms, and domestic ephemera sourced from thrift stores are layered to build textured surfaces that blur the line between painting and installation. A custom wallpaper—based on a 1970s pattern from her childhood home—features gilded floral motifs and subtle renderings of the female reproductive system, signaling both beauty and rupture in a moment of heightened political tension surrounding women’s bodies. The exhibition also explores the politics of place, particularly the impact of gentrification on Chicago’s South Side and the erasure of culturally significant spaces. Imagined storefronts serve as speculative interventions—sites where hyperfeminine care practices are re-centered as both joyful and subversive.
These visual constructions explore how gender is performed, how womanhood is politicized, and how Latinx communities, particularly in Chicago, continue to push through structural inequality, environmental crisis, and cultural erasure with humor, care, and defiance. Taken together, Pu$h Thru is a love letter to the last decade while looking ahead; it is a reclamation of space and time, both intimate and collective.
Essay
by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas
Portals of Tenderness
By Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas
I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become. The word, the image and the feeling have a palatable energy, a kind of power. Con imágenes domo mi miedo, cruzo los abismos que tengo por dentro.
-Gloria
Anzaldúa¹
In this latest body of work, Yvette Mayorga expands her evolving practice as a worldbuilder, with one foot firmly planted in her home state of Illinois, and the other adrift in a gilded, candy-colored dreamscape of her own invention. Her sumptuous paintings reflect her commitment to narrating the complexities of migration, memory, and self-making. As Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “with images I tame my fear, I cross the abysses I have inside”—a sentiment that resonates deeply with Mayorga’s visual strategies. Like Anzaldúa, Mayorga engages generational legacies of gendered labor, crafting aesthetic spaces that function as both sites of cultural reckoning and acts of reclamation.
At its core, Mayorga’s practice is an act of devotion—to her family, her community, and the city she has called home for over a decade. But it is also a testament to self-determination and an entrepreneurial clarity rarely seen in the early stages of an artist’s career. In an era when emerging artists are often quickly absorbed—and just as quickly discarded—by commercial systems, Mayorga has built a thriving studio practice entirely on her own terms. From her Pilsen studio—affectionately known as the “Pink Factory”—materials drawn from the neighborhood are reimagined into something mythic. Stepping inside feels like entering one of her paintings: carts of rhinestones, nail charms, found textiles, and tchotchkes
¹Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Auntute Books, 1987), 93.
gathered from nearby shops intermingle with family photographs and buckets of pink paint, all awaiting transformation into the ever-expanding world of Latinxoco. Inside this world, time is elastic. Mayorga invites us to slip between centuries and decades, collapsing historical distance through material, memory, and ornament. In a single composition, we find ourselves in an 18th-century French garden, a 90s Midwestern living room, and a speculative Latinx future—all seamlessly interwoven. Her work offers more than visual pleasure; it grants onlookers a radical temporal mobility, of moving backward, forward, and laterally through time.
Chicago was the Mayorga family’s first home after migrating from Jalisco, Mexico in 1970. As the youngest of five, Yvette Mayorga continues to mine this transgenerational legacy of place and the pursuit of the American Dream. In recent years, she has turned to the Rococo period to develop her self-coined worldbuilding strategy, Latinxoco, combining the ornamental language of 17th- and 18th-century European painting into the textures of Latinx life. With-
Yvette Mayorga, La Usurpadora Not 4 Me, 2025
in this framework, she inserts herself—and her family’s story—into the gilded voids of colonial art history, remixing past and present, joy and survival, into a lush, unrelenting archive of belonging.
In She’s in the cake / Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret, Mayorga draws on 18th-century fête galante painting to reimagine scenes of aristocratic leisure within the context of suburban, working-class America. Set in a verdant field and encircled by parked neighborhood cars, the composition fuses Rococo opulence with the everyday markers of Midwestern life: a Budweiser can, ketchup-red flames licking the grill, hot dogs rendered with such tactile impasto you can almost smell the char. Gilded and theatrical, the gold frame bleeds into the painting itself—a golden-laced sleeve extends past the edge to flip the hot dogs. The source image is a photograph of the artist as a child at her own birthday party, her brother pushing her head into the cake with playful, affectionate mischief. A plane flies overhead trailing a banner that reads “1800 Loans,” a symbol of economic precarity that floats in the margins of celebration. Like so many aspirations tied to the American Dream, it’s both ever-present and out of reach. Mayorga does not simply depict a life, she enshrines its contradictions, its sweetness and struggle.
This fusion of personal history, mass culture, and art historical critique is central to Mayorga’s Latinxoco world, where every object, figure, and embellishment carries symbolic weight. And yet, she resists didacticism. Her figures always possess autonomy; they are not fixed narratives but open portals. In La Usurpadora Not 4 Me— titled after a 1990s telenovela—Mayorga transforms melodrama into myth, slipping fluidly between fictional, familial, and fantastical registers. The domestic interior is modeled after her family home in Moline, Illinois, but rendered through a dreamlike lens. A passing car and a clapboard house open more portals with each window unveiling its own vignette: cropped Rococo paintings, a bedframe, and a scene lifted directly from La Usurpadora. One picture leads to another like a hallway of mirrors, suggesting that memory itself is a telenovela whose episodes never end but loop, remix, and replay. The cotton-candy pink figures stand in for the artist—
Yvette Mayorga, She’s in the cake / Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret, 2025
and for every Latina girl who came of age during J.Lo’s ascent to stardom—a moment defined by both a surge in Latinx visibility in pop culture and the contradictory casting of ethnically ambiguous roles in film. This scene recalls a millennial girlhood shaped by the pressure to code-switch, long before we had a name for it.
Mayorga’s paintings often speak to one another, returning to familiar scenes with new focus. In W3 R TIR3D, the viewer is placed inside the blue car that once appeared in the distance, circling the birthday party in She’s in the cake / Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret. Here, the composition becomes fractured and cinematic, resisting a fixed perspective. Monarch butterflies—migratory creatures who, unlike humans, cross borders without restriction, surveillance, or fear—drift above the pink wall and into the blue sky in opulent freedom. Inside the cars, the figures appear in varying states of motion: some in protest, others enjoying moments of tenderness and retreat. “We are tired”—a sentiment that reverberates across Latinx communities—voices collective exhaustion shaped
Yvette Mayorga, La Usurpadora Not 4 Me (details), 2025
by years of xenophobia, advocacy, and survival. Mayorga names what is so often held in.
If W3 R TIR3D maps the emotional landscape of collective fatigue, PU$$H PU$$H THRU and Hot and Ready offer spaces of self-fashioning and healing. Set within stylized Chicago beauty parlors, these paintings portray storefronts of the past and present, transforming them into portals of care and transformation. Here, Mayorga’s beloved figures receive fabulous hairdos and get their nails done. Mirrors draw us in, folding the viewer into the scene. As with much of her work, perspective remains fluid—we may be passing by, stepping through a gilded door, or already inside, reflected back at ourselves. These salons become sites of personal ritual, where care is both aesthetic and emotional—acts of intimate self-love from an artist whose practice carries the weight of visibility and representation.
Yvette Mayorga, W3 R TIR3D (detail), 2025
Yvette Mayorga, She’s in the cake / Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret (detail), 2025
With this exhibition, Mayorga turns inward to move outward, offering a suite of works that are fantastical, tender, and ever-unfolding. Together, they form a love letter to the places that have shaped her—both as a woman and as an artist. They also stand as a testament to the strength it takes to persist, and to push through, in a world that demands so much of women of color, especially those who choose to lead with vulnerability. Mayorga doesn’t simply depict care—she practices it, inviting us to join her in moments of radical tenderness, sensory pleasure, and communal healing.
Yvette Mayorga, PU$$H PU$$H THRU, 2025
Yvette Mayorga, Hot and Ready, 2025
Yvette Mayorga, Hot and Ready (detail), 2025
Installation Views
Artworks
Hot and Ready, 2025 collage, rhinestones, acrylic marker, silver foil, gold foil, pen, pastel, mirror, acrylic nails, stickers, rhinestones, gold flakes, nail charms, collage, glitter and acrylic piping on canvas
48 x 36 in 121.9 x 91.4 cm
She's in the cake/Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret, 2025 collage, glitter, buttons, textile, birthday candles, pastel, cardboard, gold foil, silver foil, gold flakes, stickers, cake toppers, acrylic marker, acrylic nails, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
60 x 120 in
152.4 x 304.8 cm
PU$$H PU$$H THRU, 2025
collage, rhinestones, glitter, acrylic marker, silver foil, gold foil, pen, toy boat, mirror, marker, acrylic nails, stickers, textile, leather, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas 48 x 36 in 121.9 x 91.4 cm
W3 R TIR3D, 2025 collage, rhinestones, plastic butterflies, acrylic marker, pastel, silver foil, gold foil, pen, acrylic nails, car sticker, butterflies, glitter, gold flakes, silver flakes, textile, belt, rhinestones, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
48 x 36 in 121.9 x 91.4 cm
72 x 60 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm
Rhinestone Vaquero After Éisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2025 textile, rhinestones, buttons, belt buckle, gold flakes, silver flakes, glitter, and acrylic piping on canvas
La Ursupadora Not 4 Me, 2025 collage, textile, glitter, lamp, shade, pen, electrical outlet, hoop earrings, shoes, jeans, marker, pastel, drawer handles, lampshade, ceramic belt, felt, pastel, clock, stickers, gold flakes, gold foil, mirror, acrylic nails, textile, nail charms, tv control, and acrylic piping on canvas
60 x 120 in 152.4 x 304.8 cm
72 x 60 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm
Self Portrait of the Artist After Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2025 textile, collage, stickers, gold flakes, silver flakes, pen, lace, buttons, acrylic nails, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
Taffy Taffy (Remnant Series), 2025
found objects and acrylic piping on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
La Serpiente (Remnant Series), 2024 found objects and acrylic piping on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
I See Gold (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects, chain and acrylic piping on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
What's Hidden Beneath (Remnant Series), 2025
found objects, nail charms, and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
Party Favor (Remnant Series), 2025
found objects, nail charms, party favor, and acrylic piping on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
The Portal (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects and acrylic piping on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
SMILE NOW (Remnant Series), 2025
found objects and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Her works link feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. They flaunt a maximalist aesthetic rooted in personal narrative and familial histories to examine the Latinx experience in the US. Mimicking the confectionary labors performed by bakery workers, Mayorga uses piping bags to thickly apply her signature bubblegum pink acrylics to varying sized canvases.
Mayorga (b.1991, Moline, IL) holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Notable solo exhibitions include The Golden Cage at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, MX (2024); Dreaming of You at The Aldrich
Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023-24); and What a Time to Be at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; John Michael Kohler Art Center, WI; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; DePaul Art Museum, IL; Vincent Price Art Museum, CA; The Center for Craft, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, among others.
Mayorga’s works are in the permanent collections of Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, KY; Cerámica Suro, Guadalajara, MX; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; and New Mexico State University Art Museum, NM. Awards and fellowships include the Cerámica Suro Residency (2023), New Mexico Arts Artists Residency at New Mexico Art Museum (2022) and the Individual Artist Program Grant in Chicago, IL (2022) among others. Mayorga’s public artwork installation Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, (2023) for the City of Chicago’s O’Hare airport Terminal 5, is on view for the next 25 years. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
YvYPhoto by Marzena Abrahamik
Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas is a curator and writer based in New York City. Her curatorial practice spans indoor and outdoor spaces, exploring how colonial structures continue to shape narratives of land, place, and identity. Most recently, she served as Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY, and as Co-Curator of Desert X 2025 in the Coachella Valley, CA.
Formerly, Garcia-Maestas was Associate Curator of Visual Arts at the Momentary, the contemporary satellite space of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she developed a robust exhibition program focused on site-specific, architectural interventions. While at the Momentary, she organized over a dozen exhibitions and new commissions, including Yvette Mayorga’s first institutional solo exhibition, What a Time to Be (2022); Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Let Earth Breathe (2022); A Divided Landscape (2022); Diana Al-Hadid: Ash in the Trade Winds (2021); and In Some Form or Fashion (2021). She has held curatorial positions at the Denver Art Museum, the Biennial of the Americas, and MCA Denver.
Photo by Kate Jones
Exhibition Checklist
Hot and Ready, 2025 collage, rhinestones, acrylic marker, silver foil, gold foil, pen, pastel, mirror, acrylic nails, stickers, rhinestones, gold flakes, nail charms, collage, glitter and acrylic piping on canvas
48 x 36 in 121.9 x 91.4 cm
She's in the cake/Put out the fire after Nicolas Lancret, 2025 collage, glitter, buttons, textile, birthday candles, pastel, cardboard, gold foil, silver foil, gold flakes, stickers, cake toppers, acrylic marker, acrylic nails, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
60 x 120 in 152.4 x 304.8 cm
PU$$H PU$$H THRU, 2025 collage, rhinestones, glitter, acrylic marker, silver foil, gold foil, pen, toy boat, mirror, marker, acrylic nails, stickers, textile, leather, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
48 x 36 in 121.9 x 91.4 cm
W3 R TIR3D, 2025 collage, rhinestones, plastic butterflies, acrylic marker, pastel, silver foil, gold foil, pen, acrylic nails, car sticker, butterflies, glitter, gold flakes, silver flakes, textile, belt, rhinestones, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
48 x 36 in 121.9 x 91.4 cm
Rhinestone Vaquero After Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2025 textile, rhinestones, buttons, belt buckle, gold flakes, silver flakes, glitter, and acrylic piping on canvas
72 x 60 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm
La Ursupadora Not 4 Me, 2025 collage, textile, glitter, lamp shade, pen, electrical outlet, hoop earrings, shoes, jeans, marker, pastel, drawer handles, ceramic, belt, felt, pastel, clock, stickers, gold flakes, golf foil, mirror, acrylic nails, textile, nail charms, tv control, and acrylic piping on canvas
60 x 120 in 152.4 x 304.8 cm
Self Portrait of the Artist After Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2025
textile, collage, stickers, gold flakes, silver flakes, pen, lace, buttons, acrylic nails, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas
72 x 60 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm
Taffy Taffy (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
La Serpiente (Remnant Series), 2024
found objects and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
I See Gold (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects, chain and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
What's Hidden Beneath (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects, nail charms, and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
Party Favor (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects, nail charms, party favor, and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
The Portal (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
SMILE NOW (Remnant Series), 2025 found objects and acrylic piping on canvas
16 x 12 in 40.6 x 30.5 cm
Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com
