Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Chicana painter Marta Sanchez is deeply inspired by traditional Mexican folk art expressions. Her works on paper are mostly linocuts and monotypes, which follow the social and cultural traditions of Mexican and Chicano/a Art. Her paintings are mainly on tin or industrial corrugated metal. The materials, scale, and issues connect to present day concerns.
I am looking forward to seeing this exhibition that included one of the Transcendental Train Yard prints at The National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago in February. Transcendental Train Yard suite is part of the museum’s collection. This exhibition was curated by Ishmael Cuevas & Alejandro Benavides and will be up till April 26th,2026.
Media on the exhibition
Chicago Reader
12/19/25
The legacy of America’s traqueros
A National Museum of Mexican Art exhibition highlights the little-known history of Mexican railroad workers.
Exciting news to share! Cheech Marin recently purchased my painting Retablo for Uvalde, a piece that took me a year to complete. It was created as a tribute to the 21 lives lost due to gun violence, and the emotions and grief that come with it. I am grateful that this painting will now be part of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture at the Riverside Museum, where it will be shared with the community. Thank you, Cheech Marin, for recognizing the importance of this piece and for supporting its place in the collection.https://riversideartmuseum.org/visit/the-cheech-marin-center-for-chicano-art-culture/
I want to thank Patricia Ruiz Healy for featuring my work at her gallery(RUIZ-HEALY ART) in Manhattan July -August’25. I sold four of the five works exhibited.
Still life for Ms Kittie, oil on Masonite, 2023 (sold0
Summer time, oil and enamel on tin 1993 (Sold)
Roma oil on tin, 1982 (Sold)
Altar For Father McNally, oil on Masonite, 2023 (Sold)
Sunday Tea, oil on Masonite, 2024
Art with Inliquid and Dirty Franks Pub
Some of the work installed at Dirty Franks. 2025
Transcedental Train Yards
This summer also included having my collaborative work with Norma E.Cantú, Our suite, Transcendental Train Yards was added to The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino. This collection of ten prints and book will be housed in an institution that shares our proudful contributions of Mexican Americans, Latinos and all immigrants who worked hard building and maintaing the trainyards of America.
The Art along the 23 (trolley) works donated to Philadelphia libraries this summer.
Works created under the Art Along the 23, donated this summer. This project was sponsored by the Knight Foundation
Tim Horas,library supervisor@Lillian Marrero Library recieving donation of 23 trolley painting 2025Collaboration donated to julia Burgos Library in Northern Liberties
Latina Artists Take Texas Culture to New York City
The Ruiz-Healy Art Gallery in New York City presents Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters, a group exhibition that includes works by Marta Sánchez , Eva Marengo Sánchez , and Ethel Shipton. The exhibit will be on view at the gallery from June 12 to August 15, 2025. Women Painters tackles the Latina cultural milieu through themes of cityscapes, motherhood, mementos, and domesticity.
Marta Sánchez has been an influential figure in Chicano/a and Latina art since her inclusion in the Mira! show in 1984, the first national Chicano/Latino art exhibition in America.
Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Sánchez has been painting and teaching art in Pennsylvania for the past 30 years. She constructs a cultural identity portrait by merging everyday life scenes with folkloric expression. Sánchez approaches her artistic life with the idea of “sharing art, history, and activism.”
Sánchez’ love of art began at age five when an aunt bought her an art print from a street vendor. Early in life she also collected and read comic books which led her to begin teaching herself the art of drawing. Her appreciation of art grew as she ventured downtown on the city bus by herself at age nine to browse through the art bookshelves of the San Antonio Public Library. Sánchez earned her BFA in Art Education from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982 and later an MFA in Painting from the Philadelphia Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Her time in Austin was formative–she was introduced to the Chicano Movement through fellow artist Santa Barraza and began to see art as a form of social activism.
To find her voice as an artist, Sánchez gained inspiration from Austin’s many exhibitions, plays, and jazz sessions. Sánchez wrote: “My work slowly turned from being purely artistic to becoming art that served a purpose as I evolved from being a student, to an artist, to a Chicana artist.”
A significant amount of Sánchez’ work is deeply influenced by traditional Mexican folk art, and she is one of the leading Chicana artists engaged in retablo paintings and ex-votos, the small devotional paintings on tin that honor saints and express gratitude or petitions in Mexican Catholic tradition. She is also inspired by contemporary social issues and uses her art to reflect on both her heritage and present-day concerns. Sánchez’ artistic practice includes linocuts, monotypes, and works on aluminum or tin, often exploring themes of migration, community, and memory. Notably, she has created a series of prints and paintings focused on the San Antonio train yards near her childhood home, examining the role of trains in Mexican migration and the city’s history. She has collaborated with other artists and poets, including a project with Chicana poet Norma E. Cantú that resulted in the book Transcendental Train Yards (Wings Press, 2013).
Sánchez has lived in Pennsylvania for the past three decades. Nonetheless, she remains deeply connected to her Texas roots and frequently references her childhood and Chicana identity in her work.
Another San Antonio artist, Eva Marengo Sánchez, uses her art to brilliantly capture the state of mind, color, and flavor of her hometown. She has been featured in stories by Texas Public Radio and Texas Monthly magazine. Sánchez paints canvases in her studio, images on concrete highway pillars, and murals on tall buildings. She is a rising star in the Latino art scene. Following her graduation from a small liberal arts college in Richmond, Virginia, Sánchez began an internship with Andy and Yvette Benavides at their San Antonio South Flores frame shop in 2013. The following year, Sánchez traveled to Mexico City where she worked on her Spanish and studied Meso-American art and architecture. Her interest in the art of the great Mexican muralists grew as she visited museums and saw the best of Mexican art in public buildings.
Eva left Mexico with a strong desire to devote herself fulltime to painting. Eager to strengthen her artistic skills, she enrolled in several art classes at San Antonio College. At the same time she developed a deep interest in the color and texture of Mexican food which led her to painting pan dulce, tacos, and frutas frescas commonly found in Mexican restaurants and bakeries on the Westside of San Antonio. Sánchez’ murals of pan dulce [Mexican sweet bread] at the San Antonio International Airport and on downtown highway columns adjacent to the city’s Mexican Mercado have contributed to her reputation as a realistic still life painter.
A show at the Presa House Gallery in 2019 curated by Rigo Luna helped “jump start” her career. More recently Sánchez participated in the “Soy de Tejas” show in San Antonio and Fort Worth, Texas. Several years ago when Sánchez was a participating artist in virtual discussions of contemporary art at the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Harriett and I heard her describe her use of still life and food as a way of talking about cultural identity.
Eva’s work in the Ruiz Healy exhibit presents on canvas her realistic “still life portraits” of seemingly mundane subjects. The oil on canvas painting titled “No, I can fix it! To: Tia Lupe” is an excellent example of ordinary objects in life that capture her attention. Ruiz Healy noted, “Sánchez explores the complexities of grief, guilt, and regret that arise from attachment to an inanimate object. She delves into the intersection of longing, hope, love, and nostalgia, exploring deep sentimental ties to the ordinary.”
A third artist in the NY show, Ethel Shipton, grew up in the borderland community of Laredo, Texas during a time when the border was more open and movement back and forth across the international bridge over the Rio Grande was more fluid. The border influenced her interest in artistic endeavors. She told the San Antonio Current that her first exposure to art, in many ways, was walking through the markets in Nuevo Laredo looking at all the handmade objects, from metals, to ceramics, to glass works, to textiles, and becoming aware of the changing of the objects from season to season.
Shipton left Laredo to attend the University of Texas in Austin where she developed a deeper interest in art. After graduating with a Bachelor of Art degree, she became a full time photographer at the Texas State Capitol. She has fond memories of photographing Texas Governor Ann Richards and Texas Senator and U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
A move to Mexico City in 1990 sealed Shipton’s passion for art. In Mexico City she lived in an art colony in the very center of town, several blocks from the famed Plaza Major. She stayed two years and returned to Austin
in 1992. Harriett and I met her during her photography years after her return to Austin, but we were not familiar with her art work.
Shipton’s art career began to evolve after she moved to San Antonio in the mid-nineties. She rented a house in the famed “Compound” owned by patron of the arts Mike Casey, near Blue Star, an emerging art complex. She continued her photography work while developing a deep interest in canvas painting. At the Compound, she established a close friendship with well-known San Antonio artist Chuck Ramirez. One of the great features of living in Southtown was its proximity to Blue Star where she rented a studio for $50 a month.
Curator and gallery owner Dr. Patricia Ruiz-Healy describes Shipton’s conceptual practice as encompassing “a variety of expressions” including text, and notes that her work centers on “urban scenes, language, and attempts to process information.” A Glasstire reviewer explained how Shipton’s obsession with signs and signals—like those found on highways or in city streets—”becomes central to her work, transforming everyday objects into artistic statements that prompt deeper reflection on meaning and perception.”
The experience of urban environments—specifically those shaped by the fluidity of the U.S.-Mexico border—is a recurring artistic device in Shipton’s work. Her art frequently draws attention to the ways language and information shape our understanding of the world. In her painting “Where are going?” in the Ruiz-Healy exhibit, Shipton incorporates text, signage, and symbols. One sign reads “Rough Road” while two other signs warn “Street Not Thru” and “Detour.” In addition, Shipton added the words “Donde Vamos?” [Where are we going] and “Chaos.”
The local arts newspaper SA Current further noted that Shipton’s use of text and typography in prints emphasizes her approach as both conceptually driven and rooted in the bare-bones presentation of language. A companion oil painting in the New York exhibit has a similar question “Where are we going?” but below the highway overpass, she places several tents similar to those used by homeless individuals. The lower highway leads to “Chaos,” a word Shipton repeats three times in the painting. The artist wants to engage viewers and knows that they will likely have ample questions about the objects and meanings of texts embedded in and near her highway paintings.
artdaily Monday June 23,2025
The Vast and Varied: Texas Women Painters exhibit will introduce East Coast viewers to a complexity of South Texas and Borderland culture that is definitively vast and varied and very exciting to experience through the eyes of these Latina artists.
SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruiz-Healy Art presents Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters, a group exhibition of works by Jennifer Agricola Mojica, Eva Marengo Sánchez, Audrey Rodríguez, Marta Sánchez, and Ethel Shipton. The exhibition will be on view at the New York City gallery until August 15, 2025. Vast and Varied: Texan Women Painters tackles the cultural milieu through themes of cityscapes, motherhood, mementos, and domesticity.
San Antonio-based artist Jennifer Agricola Mojica paints vibrant, ephemeral spaces that offer belonging in a discordant world. Her superimposed compositions cross genres of abstraction and figurative painting. By stripping and rebuilding thick layers of paint, Agricola Mojica creates visual tensions that allude to fractured memory and the deception of time. In The Sixteen Dollar Cake, a sleeping figure is positioned under a lush canopy of monstera plants as lingering smoke rises from the wicks of extinguished birthday candles, alluding to memories and the passage of time. Jennifer Agricola Mojica’s paintings in the exhibition portray the transience of navigating through grief and motherhood with fragmented forms.
Eva Marengo Sánchez paints realistic still lifes of seemingly mundane subjects. The paintings displayed in the Vast and Varied exhibition celebrate her cultural heritage and document her upbringing in San Antonio, Texas. Marengo Sánchez captures snapshots of life to reveal the complex emotional experiences of memory, nostalgia, and loss. The painting titled No, I can fix it! To: Tia Lupe, focuses on a broken chair that was once a fixture in Tia Lupe’s kitchen. Marengo Sánchez explores the complexities of grief, guilt, and regret that arise from attachment to an inanimate object. She delves into the intersection of longing, hope, love, and nostalgia, exploring deep, sentimental ties to the ordinary. The artist emphasizes objects, prioritizing the expression of emotional truth.
Similarly, Audrey Rodríguez assembles objects of personal and social significance that she pulls from familial settings. Her observational still lifes, which are rooted in cross cultural identity, integrate elements of magical realism that enable her work to reflect intergenerational attitudes towards migration and the circulation of objects and goods across borders. Growing up in Port Isabel, South Texas, and later moving to New York, the artist elaborates on how movement has shaped how she sees and values the everyday. “Living in Brooklyn now, I still carry those textures through color, material, and memory. The objects I paint aren’t just things; they hold a sense of movement, adaptation, and dual belonging.”
Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Chicana artist Marta Sánchez constructs a cultural identity portrait by merging everyday life scenes with folkloric expression. Her figurative style, featuring religious icons typically adorned in shrines and altars, renders her artworks as contemporary retablos. Retablos, small devotional paintings featuring religious scenes and Catholic saints, are popular folk art in Mexico derived from traditional Catholic church art brought to the Americas by the Spanish Empire. Sánchez follows in the traditions of retablos in paintings such as Rome, where Sánchez depicts a boy and a girl unaware of the saints that hover over their beds, with the text of a prayer framing the image.
Focusing on the often unnoticed signs and symbols of urban life, Ethel Shipton documents images from text, signs, and graffiti seen on the street, repurposing them into screenprints and paintings. Her work often features texts and colloquialisms in English and Spanish, as seen in Where are we going I, where an indiscernible highway is overlaid with road signs and the phrase Donde Vamos/ Where are we going.
I felt very grateful and loved when I was invited to share Cascarones to travelers in the airport(art at the airport) the Woodmere Art Museum. Both of these institutions support and highlight Philadelphia’s rich artist community. Their support gives me the optomisum needed to go forward and make philanthropic art. As an Chicana, activist I shares one of the jewel like traditions of my Mexican culture, AIDS awareness, and the act of kindenss to those in need. For over 30 years communitues like these two make it possible to create our artistic vision. In these troubled times I feel we all need respite. Cascarones bring the joy of my childhood to mind. Eggs, spring, and rebirth, as we see everything beginning to blossom. I wish everyone a blessed Easter, a happy spring and much luck when cracking a cascarone over a loved ones head or being the recipient of an egg cracking. Life is fast and spontaneous just like the cascarone.
Art at the Airport bring art to the community of travelers
invite thu the airport
travelors taking a break to decorat eggs for us
Some of the Cascarones produced @ the airport
Woodmere Workshop
Concentrating cascarobnes decorator
glitter, whats not to love about glitter?
cool designs
Thank you Bill ,Glen and Hildy for having me at the Woodmere
confetti from a cracked egg
I will be selling the Cascarones at the Reading Terminal Market in Center City Philadelpha March 28-30th with funds donated to Camp Dream Catcher. (https://campdreamcatcher.org). Special thanks to The Reading TErminal Market for the donated table and HACE for their ongoing support.
I started this journey with Norma E.Cantú in 2020! Collaborating from afar and printing this suite at Sam Coronado’s studio in Austin Texas was a rich and memorable time for me. This suite of ten prints has been sold and donated to individuals and institutions throughout the U.S. to serve as a visual and poetic bookmark of the Mexican experience with the train yards. I only have 10 out of the edition of 50 available for sale. Please share with train lovers, Latino Studies scholars and others that may enjoy and benefit from the suite and the book that is included.
Now Open! (re)FOCUS@BWA: Prints by Women, Then and Now
Since its 1972 founding in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden neighborhood, women artists have always been essential to the printmaking community nurtured by Brandywine. (re)FOCUS@BWA: Prints by Women, Then and Now is our contribution to (re)FOCUS, Philadelphia’s extended, citywide celebration of women working in the visual arts not only in Philadelphia, but throughout the world. This amassing of exhibitions and related programs honors and extends the legacy of FOCUS: Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, a historically significant feminist arts festival presented in 1974.With Marta Sánchez and her print R Cigarro, R Barril (2002) are (left) William Valerio, Director and CEO of the Woodmere Art Museum, and Glen Sacks
(From left) Artist John Dowell, Board member Jeffery Cruse, Executive Director Michele Parchment, (re)FOCUS@BWA curator Ruth Fine, Founder and President Emeritus Allan Edmunds, Board member Patty Smith, Board Chair Jean Woodley, and Board member Ted Agoos with Belkis Ayón’s Untitled II (1999), which was printed by Ms. Smith.
Hester Stinnett with her print Fortune (1987)Celebrated in (re)FOCUS@BWA are internationally acclaimed artists Emma Amos, Tomie Arai, Belkis Ayón, Camille Billops, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonya Clark, Maya Freelon, Letitia Huckaby, Lois M. Johnson, Jean LaMarr, Samella Lewis, Yong Soon Min,E. J. Montgomery, Vitjitua Ndjiharine (see article below), Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Marta Sánchez, Hester Stinnett, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Gayle Tanaka, Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, Sarah Van Keuren, and Deborah Willis.
(re)FOCUS@BWA was inspired by Brandywine’s Executive Director, Michele A. Parchment. It was organized by Ruth Fine with Gustavo Garcia, Brandywine’s Associate Director for Artist Residencies & Media Projects. Now an independent curator and artist, Ms. Fine served as a curator with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for more than 30 years. She was a BWA Visiting Artist in 1982.
I am happy to share my particpation in the re(Focus) exhibition at the Brandywine Workshop and Archive. Thank you Ruth Fine and Gustavo Garcia for including my work in this rich exhibition.This one of many exhibits city wide exhibitions highlighting women artists. re(Focus) in the city runs from January 27 to May 31st.
(re)FOCUS@BWA: Prints by Women, Then and Now Lois M. Johnson, Site: North Dakota, 1982 Women artists have always been essential to the printmaking community nurtured by Brandywine Workshop and Archives since it was founded in 1972 by Allan L. Edmunds. (re)FOCUS@BWA presents two dozen prints, one each by 24 of nearly 200 women artists who have had residencies at Brandywine. Celebrated in (re)FOCUS@BWA are internationally acclaimed artists Emma Amos, Tomie Arai, Belkis Ayón, Camille Billops, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonya Clark, Maya Freelon, Letitia Huckaby, Lois M. Johnson, Jean LaMarr, Samella Lewis, Yong Soon Min, E. J. Montgomery, Vitjitua Ndjiharine, Howardena Pindell, Betty Saar, Marta Sanchez, Hester Stinnett, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Gayle Tanaka, Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, Sarah Van Keuren, and Deborah Willis. Yong Soon Min, Crossings, 1992 Belkis Ayón-Manso, Untitled II, 1999 (re)FOCUS@BWA is Brandywine’s contribution to (re)FOCUS, Philadelphia’s extended, citywide celebration of women working in the visual arts not only in Philadelphia, but throughout the world. This amassing of exhibitions and related programs honors and extends the legacy of FOCUS: Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, a historically significant feminist arts festival presented in 1974.(re)FOCUS@BWA was inspired by Brandywine’s Executive Director, Michele A. Parchment. It was organized by Ruth Fine with Gustavo Garcia, BWA’s Associate Director for Artist Residencies & Media Projects. Ms. Fine is an independent curator and artist who, from 1972 to 1980, was Curator of Lessing J. Rosenwald’s Alverthorpe Gallery in suburban Philadelphia, which was administered by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; was the NGA’s Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings from 1980 to 2002; and from 2003 to 2012 was the NGA’s Curator of Special Projects in Modern Art. She was a BWA Visiting Artist in 1982.
With Marta Sánchez and her print R Cigarro, R Barril (2002) are (left) William Valerio, Director and CEO of the Woodmere Art Museum, and Glen Sacks
Hester Stinnett with her print Fortune (1987)Celebrated in (re)FOCUS@BWA are internationally acclaimed artists Emma Amos, Tomie Arai, Belkis Ayón, Camille Billops, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonya Clark, Maya Freelon, Letitia Huckaby, Lois M. Johnson, Jean LaMarr, Samella Lewis, Yong Soon Min, E. J. Montgomery, Vitjitua Ndjiharine (see article below), Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Marta Sánchez, Hester Stinnett, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Gayle Tanaka, Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, Sarah Van Keuren, and Deborah Willis.
