The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco Presents Sonia Romero: Taken Root

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (February 26, 2025) – The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco (USF) brings a survey exhibition of Los Angeles studio and public works artist Sonia Romero to the Bay Area with Sonia Romero: Taken Root on view from March 3-April 15, 2025. 

Opening events include a celebration with the artist and curator on Tuesday, March 4, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and a curator talk featuring Karen Rapp on Wednesday, March 5, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.

Including over 50 pieces spanning from the early 2000s to the present, Taken Root highlights Romero’s boundary-pushing art practice, as well as her important contributions to the Los Angeles art landscape as the creator of multiple permanent public artworks. The exhibition celebrates the artist’s signature visual language that expands the possibilities of the mediums of printmaking, painting and paper cutting. 

Romero’s methodical, yet playful processes blur distinctions between painting and printmaking, creating varied and complex artworks. The resulting painted and collaged canvases, monoprints, linocuts and silkscreens as well as hand-painted tiles, embossed ceramics and laser-cut steel forms are both materially and technically intertwined. Her mastery of the linocut and its limitless possibilities of repetition, pattern and bold graphic qualities has blossomed into a signature style in which prints merge within a painting, the linocut begets a paper cut, the papercut becomes the model for a painting, and so on. 

An astute observer of contemporary culture, Romero’s works address the consequences of human overconsumption and the need to tap into a state of inner wellbeing. One of the hallmarks of Romero’s practice is her commitment to making her artwork accessible to the widest potential audience—thereby carrying the torch of important Mexican and Chicanx artistic forebears. Her desire to connect her artwork with broad audiences is most pronounced in the more than ten permanent public art commissions she has completed across southern California. Taken Root provides the first opportunity to consider her various bodies of work produced over the last 20 years in the context of one another. 

The exhibition was curated by Karen Rapp, Director & Curator at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, where it debuted in fall 2023.

About the Artist

Romero, born in 1980 in Los Angeles, exemplifies the identity and lived experience of a “both/and” artist. Her artistic path synthesizes her Chicanx heritage traced through the Romero family (her father is artist Frank Romero) with her Ashkenazi Jewish matrilineal line influenced by her grandmother, the late artist and folk art collector Edith Wyle, founder of Los Angeles’s Craft and Folk Art Museum, as well as her mother Nancy Romero, also a visual artist. Describing herself as an artist since she was a child, Romero’s multi-ethnic upbringing has been formative to the development of her individual expression that transcends categories of belonging as well as artmaking. 

Romero holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2002) and is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (1998). She has shown her work broadly in Los Angeles and beyond, including solo and two-person exhibitions at Avenue 50 Studio, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles; and Self Help Graphics and Art, Los Angeles. Her works have also been featured in group exhibitions at the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, Irvine, CA; the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, to name a few. Two examples from Romero’s growing body of permanent public art commissions include “Hecho a Mano,” (2020) a hand-painted mural on aluminum for the Mariachi Plaza Metro Station, Los Angeles, CA and the “Little Tokyo Medallion Project,” powder-coated aluminum (2013) commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles. Her artwork is held in the permanent collection of The Autry Museum of the American West, the City of Cerritos Public Library, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, the UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, and the McNay Art Museum.

About Thacher Gallery

The Thacher Gallery is a public art gallery in the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library where creativity, scholarship, and community converge. The gallery is free and open to the public daily from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. Located at 2130 Fulton Street. (415) 422-5178.

About the University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco is a private, Jesuit Catholic university that reflects the diversity, optimism, and opportunities of the city that surrounds it. USF offers more than 230 undergraduate, graduate, professional, and certificate programs in the arts and sciences, business, law, education, and nursing and health professions. At USF, each course is an intimate learning community in which top professors encourage students to turn learning into positive action, so the students graduate equipped to do well in the world — and inspired to change it for the better. For more information, visit usfca.edu.