Fabric and paper collagist Diana Guerrero-Macia sees her art as a form of play. Five or six years ago she realized that her current work stems partly from something she did for fun with her mom as a preteen. After watching the movie Yellow Submarine, the two of them made a quilt: her mom embroidered “All You Need Is Love” on it and added an applique copied from Diana’s yellow submarine drawing. In college, before she’d heard the word “sampling” used in regard to music, Guerrero-Macia was putting phrases from songs, poems, and advertisements into paper collages. By the time she moved to Chicago in 1992, after receiving an MFA in painting, she was sewing together found fabrics–curtains, dresses, clothing. In about 1999 she began adding texts, and now teaches the history of sampling, among other subjects, at the School of the Art Institute. “Colonial schoolgirls stitched words onto pieces of linen, trying to show their piousness and their skill. They were called samplers. Sampling also fits into the 20th-century history of collage and appropriation, from Duchamp on.” Guerrero-Macia’s fragmented texts undercut any one meaning — her show at Bodybuilder & Sportsman is called “Words Make Wide Open Spaces.”
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Diana Guerrero-Macia
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jimmy Fishbein.
