Do you have to be Oaxacaquena to paint Oaxaca?

After a lifelong love affair with Mexico and all things Oaxacan, Chicago artist Nancy Hild moved to the Zapotec community of Juchitan de Zaragoza, where she found its noisy chaos and abundance of colors and sounds wonderfully over stimulating. For more than three years, she captured its ancestral culture in several series of paintings. Among them are still life portraits of women in the marketplace engaged in the trade of such animals as iguanas, turkeys, chickens, fish and crabs, to feed the community. This series is the embodiment of two themes that has fascinated Hild: the intimate spaces of women and the role of animal life in human culture. According to her, these things have the “enduring power to explain ourselves and the world around us in the forms of myths, symbols, stereotypes and metaphors.”
Three years ago, Nancy moved to historic Oaxaca de Juarez to continue her love affair and to further her explorations and interpretations of Oaxacan culture. An engaged and avid collector of things as well as images, she processes all of them as a stream of consciousness that emerges as a visual collage of a new reality, a creation of what she calls “hyper-realism.” While her works appear to be portraits of real people or animals in their natural environment, they are in fact a collection of those harbored images rendered into still-lifes.
Because of their luminescent quality, her works are often mistaken for works in oil, but are actually the result of her painstaking technique of building layers of acrylic. This method is akin to the Renaissance process of egg-tempera. Developed over a lifetime of painting, she uses tiny strokes to create myriad layers, each lightly sanded and reapplied, until Hild states, “light emerges.”
To her, it is a meditative process, motivated by the belief that any task should be approached as though one has a lifetime to do it. Accordingly, her canvases, depending on size and detail, take anywhere between a month and a year or more to create. Interestingly, her Master of Fine Art from the University of Indiana is in printmaking (lithography), which has influenced her work to some degree.
Nancy Hild was born in Ohio but had been based in Chicago for 30 years prior to moving to Oaxaca. Her work has been shown in numerous galleries, museums and cultural centers in the United States and internationally. In addition, she has received various awards, such as the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, a U.S. representative in China’s event “Shanghai in the eyes of the world artists, and listed in Who’s Who in American Art.