Hector Dionicio Mendoza: Geographies of Identity

Hector Dionicio Mendoza was born in Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico, and grew up with an appreciation for faith, ritual, and the environment.  The artist’s multimedia artworks blend ideals of geography, memory, and labor and use cardboard boxes, cinder blocks, and other synthetic and recycled materials, along with plants and natural imagery, to draw out these associations.  Mendoza’s grandfather, a fifth-generation curandero (shaman) of Afro-Caribeño lineage, who practiced alternative healing traditions, was a pivotal influence on his artistic concepts, materials, and imagery.  In Mexico, as well as Central and South America, the curandero plays an important role to many people beginning the difficult passage to El Norte/The North (United States), by providing blessings and protection for the journey. Mendoza immigrated to King City, California, with his family when he was twelve years old.  The foundation of his artistic practice is rooted in Indigenous Purépecha people’s reverence of ancestors and spirits in nature as well as the religious and spiritual concepts of Catholicism, shamanism, and ethnobotany.  Hector Dionicio Mendoza is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Installation in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University Monterey Bay.  He holds an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and an MFA from Yale University.

Organized by the Boise Art Museum

Sponsored by the Steiner Family Foundation