Michelle Cortez Gonzales is a Texas based multidisciplinary artist whose sewn-textile paintings, and sculptural installations examine memory, identity, and familial inheritance often through the lens of assimilation and cultural loss. Her practice engages material as a site for connection, resistance, and healing, drawing on domestic processes to navigate intergenerational narratives. Cortez Gonzales earned her BFA in painting from the University of Texas at Arlington, and both her MA and MFA in painting from the University of Dallas. Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine and Arts and Culture Texas. She has exhibited at Anya Tish Gallery (Houston, TX), Talley Dunn Gallery (Dallas), Presa House Gallery (San Antonio, TX), Untitled Art Fair (Miami, FL), and Dallas Art Fair (Dallas, TX). She was showcased in Visit Fort Worth’s 2021 Women Worth Meeting series, and has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center (2024), Cuttyhunk Artist Residency (2021), and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art as a 2021 Community Artist. In 2023, she was a recipient of the 2023 National Endowment for the Arts: Challenge America Grant from the Dallas District Colleges. In addition to her studio practice, Cortez Gonzales is a public art project manager with Arts Fort Worth and teaches as an adjunct professor at Tarrant County College. She is represented by Keijsers Koning Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
Statement
Through painting, collage, and textile, I create sculptural paintings and installations that explore how material connects to memory, home, identity, and how each serves as vessels for care and cultural transmission.
My practice embraces duality, integrating both two and three dimensions, craft and fine art, to reflect a liminal state of not fully belonging to one thing or another. As a Mexican American raised in Texas, my cultural experiences were conveyed through objects and silent gestures within the home. Working with my hands preserves these rituals while confronting unspoken burdens inherited from generations past.
My process is slow, labor-intensive, and driven by material exploration. By layering and manipulating paint and found materials with embroidery and sewing, I engage inherited memory and let each work carry its own history through the material. I source materials from thrift stores, joining them together to create a hybrid language of imaginary and unstable narratives, holding space for what has been lost while honoring what remains.
Each work is infused with tenderness toward my ancestors and care for my present self. In this way, material becomes memory, and making becomes a form of healing.