Michelle Cortez Gonzales is a Texas interdisciplinary artist working across painting, collage, textile, and installation. She engages material as a site for care, protection, and cultural continuity, drawing on domestic processes to navigate intergenerational narratives shaped by assimilation. 
Michelle 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, New American Paintings, and Arts and Culture Texas. She has exhibited at Nicole Longnecker Gallery , Anya Tish in Houston, Presa House Gallery in San Antonio, TX, Untitled Art Fair in Miami, Dallas Art Fair, and The Armory Show in New York, NY. Cortez Gonzales has been awarded residencies from Canopy New York, the Vermont Studio Center, Cuttyhunk Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch, Aspen, CO, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art as a Community Artist. In 2023, she received the National Endowment for the Arts: Challenge America Grant supporting an exhibtion through Dallas College featuring regional artists of color whose practice engages themes of equity, representation, and social justice. For over seven years, Cortez Gonzales served as a project manager for Fort Worth Public Art, where she oversaw major public art commissions, collaborated with artists and community partners, developed a mentorship program for emerging public artists, and advanced public engagement initiatives. She is the co‑founder of ArtHouse East, an artist‑run studio cohort and gallery in East Fort Worth, and serves as an adjunct professor at Tarrant County College.
Cortez Gonzales is represented by Keijsers Koning Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
Statement
My practice explores the gaps and partial transmissions through which cultural knowledge, language, and memory shift across generations. Working between two and three dimensions, craft and fine art, past and present I consider domestic space and material culture as sites where adaptation and loss are negotiated. Through layering, sewing, painting, and manipulation, I engage fragmentation, transparency, and repair. These strategies generate imagined, shifting narratives that allow the work to hold space for what has been lost while honoring what remains. In this way, material becomes memory, and making becomes a form of healing.
