The Art Committee of the Placitas Community Library is proud to present Colores de México as its spring exhibit in the Gracie Lee Community Room. These beautiful figurative, magical, and mystical works by Jade Leyva, Armando Adrián López and Enrique Flores offer narratives that are both unique to the artists’ Mexican roots and universal in their appeal.
Originally from Mexico City, Jade Leyva has called Placitas her home since 2006. According to the artist, her ethereal works express multiculturalism, unity, and environmental consciousness. The annual Santa Fe Contemporary Hispanic Market (CHM) awarded Leyva Best in the Oil/Acrylic Painting Category in 2017, 2019 and 2022 and Best of Show in 2021. Leyva has participated in countless exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally, and her work has been collected by people around the globe.
Armando Adrián-López, a Tarascan (Purepecha) Indian from the Mexican village of Santa Maria in Michoacan now lives in Abiquiu. Without formal training, he credits the hours he spent as a child watching his grandfather, a master craftsman, weave baskets and dolls employing traditional tools and working methods handed down through generations. Adriàn-López aspires to make creations with the same magical qualities, employing his own mixture of egg tempura with a technique he has developed over the last 15 years. His sculptures are made of natural materials including cornhusks, river willow, native grasses, ceramic clay and 24-karat gold leaf, most of which he grows organically and gathers on the farm in northern New Mexico where he settled in 1994. He has exhibited in New Mexico and throughout the United States including Good Hands Gallery in Santa Fe, the Santa Fe Spanish Market, the Abiquiu Studio Tour and the Lucero Hacienda Gallery.
Enrique Flores was born in San Pablo Huitzo, a community in the Mixtec region of the state of Oaxaca and continues to reside in Mexico. Both as a painter and as a graphic artist he employs different media to capture daily life, always using the image of a woman as a symbol of the importance of women in the development of cultures. Other recurring themes are the harvest, birds, and constellations. An early member of the Rufino Tamayo Art Workshop, in 1995 he founded the Taller de Grafica Enrique Fores in San Pablo Huitzo where he teaches, produces his own prints, and works as a master printmaker with a growing group of artists including Jade Leyva. He has participated in many group and individual exhibitions in Mexico and abroad and his work appears in a number of significant international art collections.