bio
“The new mestiza has tension en her body and in her spirit, this is a key for liberation and a new consciousness.”
Gloria Anzaldúa
Liza Zaldívar Salazar (b. 1986, Houston, Texas) lives and works in Mexico City. Her work explores identity, migration, and material circulation through painting, textile, and installation. She received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin and her MFA from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City.
Recent exhibitions include Casa Wabi, Mexico City (2024-25); Texas Biennial, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2024-25); Clavijero Museum, Morelia, Michoacán (2024-25); and La Buena Estrella, Mexico City (2025).
Zaldívar has participated in international art fairs such as Salon ACME (2024); FAIN Feria (2023); Futura Mural Festival (2019, 2021); Barrio Vivo Mural Festival (2019); and the London Design Festival (2018).
Her project Reverse Assimilation (2019) followed her grandmother’s migration path from Michoacán to the U.S., combining murals and interviews into an audio archive on Chicanx identity.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, Texas; and the Clavijero Museum, Morelia.
statement
I am a bridge from Texas to Mexico City, my body is stretched, oppressed, flexible; permanently in transition. It hurts sometimes but not always. It's more like a weight on my bones, my skin pulled in two directions, my organs contorted, my hands reaching out; my feet rooted. It is necessary to free my body from this tension to have a new possibility of being in this world.
Through painting, sculpture, video, object art and audiovisual production, my work addresses the tension and conflict of the cultural identity of Chicanx people and the feeling of oppression against them; what is lost in our bodies through assimilation or aspiration to dominant white society.
Painting is my primary medium, though my process has expanded to include materials that hold their own layered histories. I work with ropa de paca—discarded U.S. clothing found in Mexico City markets. These textiles, rerouted by global trade and consumption, are stained with the journey of migration and waste. I repurpose them into textured compositions, often allowing them to take the shape of flags—temporary emblems for the new mestiza, a person always in transition.
My work is grounded in acts of care and restoration—care for the land that holds our stories, for the body that carries generational memory, and for the fragmented identities shaped by displacement. I am committed to preserving voices long silenced by colonialism, economic violence, and cultural erasure. Each piece is a gesture of remembrance, a radical refusal to forget.
recent projects »
