The California-based artist discusses what inspires and informs her work on the heels of two major installations in New York.

Connection – among people, places and experiences – is central to the Oakland, California-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron's work. Born in Milan, Italy, to Colombian and Peruvian parents, Guzmán Capron immigrated to Houston, Texas, with her family as a teenager. There, she started going to thrift stores, inspired by how once beloved but now discarded clothing and domestic goods created a cacophony of colour, pattern and style. Engaging thrift stores to alloy different cultures and individuals despite their dissimilarities continues to inspire Guzmán Capron in the fabric-based sculptures and installations she makes today. 

Fitting Room, Guzmán Capron's solo exhibition at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries, on view through May 18, 2025, explores the potentiality of assimilation through a play with fabric, pattern, space and figuration – similar to the thrift store. Likewise, her new textileand furniture-based installation for Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio's survey of contemporary Latinx art on view through February 9, considers how we relate and touch each other through the stuff that comprises our lives.

Recently, STIR spoke to Guzmán Capron about her interest in cultural hybridity and creating a sense of connection through her blend of patterned fabrics, vibrant colour and volumic figuration. Here, she shares how she considers the multiplicity of persona, the tactility of textiles, what she wants us to feel with her work and what's next for her multifaceted practice.

Leah Triplett: I wanted to start by talking about your use of figures. Your figures are always very dreamy but use the human form so they feel tethered to reality. How did you gravitate to working with the figure? And how has that evolved over time? 

Maria A. Guzmán Capron: I was initially drawn to figures in drawing as an intuitive means to capture and communicate emotion. After moving away from figurative work, in graduate school, I began to bring the body into my textile work in a more abstract form. They gradually became more defined and specific as I began to focus more on their relationships and personalities. I also use the body as an entrance point for other ideas. Touch is very important in these works. Hands and embracing arms are things that aren’t verbal [but they] carry so much from the symbolic to the iconic – life, family and friendship. The figures could be your own self, one of your selves, or someone else. 

Leah: I also wanted to talk about a duality or plurality that I sometimes see happening in your work. Often you depict a singular figure that could actually be multiple or double figures. Interlocking hands are a motif that you frequently use as well. How do you articulate a sense of touch beyond just the tactility of the fabric itself? 

Maria: I want to open up identities, open up myself or the people that I meet and show how we are inside and how it's not just a solid little thing. 

I do love and have always been drawn to the tactility of fabric. Inherently fabric has a body and a materiality that allows it to represent and stand in for a human body. By exaggerating hands and other parts of the figures, I try to emphasise the power of touch and of reaching out to one another. In these moments of three-dimensionality, I am creating parts that parallel our bodies and offer a means by which we can connect our reality to the one inhabited by the figures and also enable them to connect with each other in the same way.  

It is also about breaking the idea of what art is as a thing on the wall that isn't meant to be touched. About breaking a barrier by creating something that comes into the world, like the foot, Mucho Más (2022) which I made for my exhibition Respira Hondo at SFMOMA.

Leah: Some of your works, like Piedra de Mar (2022) almost evoke a theatricality. Aesthetically, there's a flatness to the work and certainly, the colour and pattern emphasise abstraction, but you still introduce a moment when the work comes off the wall, as if it were a stage, into the viewer's space. It's been exciting to see you expand into installation with your work in Flow States and Fitting Room. What’s been the reaction to that development?

Maria: Having the support of institutions like El Museo del Barrio [for Flow States] and the University of Buffalo [for Fitting Room] allows [me] to push ideas and scale. I love the idea of being “extra” and thinking about size as a way to magnify messages and question our relationship to the work and how we can become part of it. Both exhibitions have been opportunities to push boundaries. It has been incredible to see people engage with the works at both institutions. The works in both shows were designed with the idea of providing those who see and interact with them with a sense of agency, a literal demonstration of their ability to change a part of their surroundings that they might normally imagine as fixed and outside of their control. And I was thrilled that this seemed to be happening.

Leah: How do you think about gaze? There's a hauntedness in your figures' gaze, a certain look and they always meet the viewer's stare. 

Maria: I am interested in the moment in which you meet someone, when your eyes meet, and you communicate something. It's about that closeness, reducing that space between art and viewer through real connection. 

Many times in my work there are multiple figures that exchange looks and one might be looking directly at the viewer, bringing them into the group. We communicate so much through sight, with how we look, what we wear and how we move. I want people to get to know the figures and what they are showing you. 

So it’s really about eye contact. To create it, I construct the eyes from small, simple shapes, a circle and a kind of elongated oval, but it takes me forever to make them. 

Leah: How do you come to the gestures your figures are making? You've done work with dance and even designed a curtain for the San Francisco Ballet. 

Maria: Implied movement and how it is expressed through gesture are really important. I think about the body's form, how it comes together or breaks a space and how it expresses emotion. I want to show you a body that can extend in ways that are not human. 

The movement in the work will always be different depending on what I'm trying to communicate. For the San Francisco Ballet, I was commissioned to design the front cloth for two wonderful ballets and, while watching a rehearsal, was very much inspired by the movements of the dancers in Carmen and Broken Wings. At El Museo, in Flow States, the figures at the centre come together both as faces and as people who hold each other. They are dancers, who themselves portray movement and rhythm, but they are also installed on curtains that visitors can open and close through a pulley system. I call them ‘Las Curlies’, referencing their curly hair and curvaceous bodies.

Leah: What's the relationship between the fabric works and the drawings? And how does painting relate to your drawings and sculptures? 

Maria: My process has changed throughout my practice. Originally, when I started working with textiles and fabrics, I didn't know anything besides that I loved this stuff. I didn't know how to sew, so I hot-glued fabric to plywood. I made masks and costumes.

Eventually, I landed on a process by which I could piece together fabric that I would then quilt and spray paint or hand paint with acrylics. Much of my practice grew from those moments and trying to understand how to modify textiles and fabrics that I found in thrift stores. Some were mass-produced. That's how and why the painting came in, as a way to change a thing that was made by a machine and make it mine. I think that process comes from a way of adapting that I feel resonates with an immigrant experience in which you seek to represent yourself but do not have access to things that you left behind and instead must adapt and make do with what is available. You change. You modify things in your immediate surroundings. 

Drawings have always been a more immediate outlet. I think it's all about getting energy out into the world. Drawings are just such a great way to push the idea out. That's where the gestural mark-making comes in, telling me things that I don't even understand that I'm going through. It's a way of communicating with myself. 

Leah: How did you start working with fabric and pattern?

Maria: I worked with fabric starting in my undergraduate studies. When I moved to Houston, I started going to thrift stores. I wanted artworks that looked like [thrift stores], a landscape of fabric from different places, people and communities, all smashed together. The sportswear mixed in with the PJ section, smashed up just like different ideas. So I started sourcing fabrics from there and glueing them together. I loved patterns that reminded me of Peru but were not quite like it.

Lately, I've been screen-printing my own fabric. Much of the fabric at El Museo and the University of Buffalo was hand-printed. For the longest time, I felt like I had to make do with what was available to me. But as I’ve been here longer and am more rooted, for the first time, I feel capable of envisioning the fabric from the start and creating it from a plain cloth. In this process, I feel genuine power. It is the same feeling I want others to have in interacting with my work; that they also have more power to envision and create a different way for things to be. Now, I am also dyeing the fabric. 

Leah: Working with dye and making your own fabric, has that changed your relationship with colour? 

Maria: The colour can be so much more intense now. It's an intensity that I didn't know I could bring into the work. But I have to be careful because though people might think everything is just really colourful, there is still a balance in the work. 

The process of dyeing and printing has changed the way I work because of the steps needed. It has slowed me down, waiting for dyes to set and printed layers to dry before I print again. It has opened up the time I dedicate to a specific work. Now there are intervals for drawings, making new screens and just letting ideas simmer and change.  

Leah: You have two big installations up now. Can you talk about what you are working on now? 

Maria: Yes, currently, aside from dyeing all this fabric, I am also doing a residency here in San Francisco called The Space Program. I am super excited about that. I am collaborating with my husband Seth and we are making functional objects similar to the bench for the show at El Museo. I like to have places for people to rest, take a moment, but places that also incorporate the figure. I am learning how to work with metal, too. 

Next, I am part of a group presentation for Frieze LA with Nazarian / Curcio and in May, I will have a solo exhibition at Lyles & King in New York. The past year has been very rich in terms of learning new processes and exploring new ideas and I am very excited to be creating and showing a new body of work that builds upon them.