Left: Aguifiiga’s
Soft
Boulders
(2010), of
carved upholstery foam
and felted merino wool,
have an almost animated
presence.
Right: The
Soft Boulders
in context at Aguifiiga’s
“Crossing the Line”
exhibition at CAFAM
(through May 8).
Left: Aguifiiga in the
thick of her installation
at CAFAM.
Below: The many tools
in the artist’s studio
suggest the wide range
of materials she uses
in her work.
she’s woven an elaborate environment
called, appropriately, “Crossing the Line”
(through May 8). She did the decorations
for the unveiling of L A Plaza de Cultura
y Artes, a new Mexican-American cultural
center downtown. As a volunteer with
the Watts House Project, she’s helping
renovate a home across from the Watts
Towers. Then there’s her job teaching
“Methods and Materials” at Otis College
of Art and Design.
As engaging as her work, Aguifiiga is a
blend of urban sophisticate and bubbly Cali-
fornian - even when discussing lofty art
matters, she favors such phrases as “total-
ly,” “for reals,” and “super.” She maintains
two studios in the hip L.A. neighborhood of
Atwater Village - a loftlike space she rents
in an artists’ complex, and, nearby, a shed in
the backyard of the small stucco house she
shares with her husband, musician and
visual merchandiser Todd Beattie, her two
college-student sisters, and her dogs, Rocky
and Juliet.
She married Beattie at 18, and they lived
first in San Diego, where she studied with
the noted woodworker Wendy Maruyama
at the state university. Making furniture
appealed to Aguifiiga’s ingrained sense of
resourcefulness: “In Mexico, people don’t
have much. You don’t throw anything
away. You make do with what you have.
You make things out of what you find.”
The border continued to figure promi-
nently in her life. As part of the Border
Art Workshop, she did outdoor projects
and murals to highlight migrant rights
issues. On weekends she drove down to
the barrio of Maclovio Rojas near Tijuana
to help run a community center, where she
encountered poverty and despair - “really
heavy emotional things.”
In 2003, the couple headed east to Provi-
dence so Aguifiiga could attend graduate
school at RISD. Leaving home was difficult.
She longed for her Mexican family, espe-
cially her aunts, who provided “warmth in
my life. The first piece I made was about
missing being hugged.” That was
Embrace
Lounge
, a daybed that envelops the body in
a nurturing hold. Eventually her work
addressed border issues overtly. For her
thesis,
The H a lf Unseen,
she made minimalist
steel half-chairs and tables that attached to a
wall and only materialized in full when the
light revealed their shadows. “It was about
the ghost side of things, the side that’s
always there but you don’t talk about it.”
Post-RISD, Aguifiiga returned to Cali-
fornia, and in 2006 she received one of the
first United States Artists Fellowships,
apr/may 11 american craft 053
Soft Boulders
photos (3): Tanya Aguifiiga
