Tina Medina and Diana Rojas

Tina Medina is an artist, educator and curator living in Dallas. Originally from West Texas, she earned her BFA at Texas Tech University and MFA at the University of North Texas and is a Dallas College art professor. Medina’s art was exhibited most recently in Soy de Tejas, a statewide survey of Latinx art in San Antonio. As co-founder of Nuestra Artist Collective, she collaboratively organized exhibitions of Texas women artists in Dallas (2022) and San Antonio (2023). Through a mixed media approach Medina’s art represents Mexican American voices in our community.

Artist Statement 

"As a U.S. woman of Mexican indigenous ancestry, my art explores displacement and identity informed by a lost connection to my ancestry, cultural traditions, and family history. My practice includes a mixed-media approach involving photography, painting, fiber art, installation, video and performance. My inspiration comes from gender roles, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry and class. I find it essential to revisit the history of the U.S. to remind ourselves how the past informs and shapes the present. My artwork speaks about power and the consequences of colonization and assimilation. I reflect on the loss of my cultural roots and consider the reconfiguration of creating a new sense of self as an integral survival mechanism."

Diana Rojas’ work exists physically and virtually, has been exhibited, screened and published nationally and internationally in spaces such as Fiesp Cultural Center, Dallas Contemporary, Chapel of Santa Maria dei Carcarati, Canyon Flats Video Wall, Rockport Center for the Arts, Texas Theater, the Yale Theater and more. She is the recipient of several OER grants from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the 2023 Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award, 2022 Judson-Morrisey Excellence in New Media Award and the Arrowmont Windgate University Fellowship. She is an assistant professor of sound art at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Artist Statement

Diana Rojas explores the hidden and invisible through interdisciplinary collaboration and conversation across fields such as philosophy, music composition, physics, material science and visual art. The tools and environments she creates - by utilizing the archaic and contemporary, the digital and sculptural, known and unknown, and the minute and immersive - culminate in experiential works that prompt viewers to slow down and inspire introspection. The slowing down that these works provoke raises questions about existence, reality and being. By combining materials and elements of theories and devices of exploration, she references their antecedents, but creates new opportunities for viewer investigation. This includes utilizing creative coding, video, 3D modeling, welding steel, kiln forming and soldering glass, and utilizing sand as projection screens. Additionally, she utilizes sound and light to create captivating installations, inspired by interest in the influence that immaterial forces have on human minds and decisions.