Michelle Cortez Gonzales is a Texas based interdisciplinary 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 memory, home, and identity. I’m interested in how materials act as vessels for care, protection, and cultural transmission.
My practice embraces duality, moving between two and three dimensions, craft and fine art, to reflect a liminal sense of belonging. As a Mexican American raised in a working-class family in Texas, much of my cultural experience was communicated through objects and quiet gestures within the home. Working with my hands allows me to honor these rituals while confronting the unspoken burdens passed down through generations.
My process is slow, labor-intensive, and rooted in material exploration. I work with domestic and found materials that hold memory and cultural continuity, transforming them through painting, layering, sewing, and manipulation. These methods create hybrid forms that blur the line between sculpture and image. Sourcing materials from thrift stores, family, and curbsides, I assemble fragments into a visual language of imagined, shifting narratives, holding space for what has been lost while honoring what remains.
Each piece carries tenderness toward my ancestors and care for my present self. In this way, material becomes memory, and making becomes a form of healing.