Sonia Romero: Taken Root

Sonia Romero: Taken Root features the artist in a twenty-plus-year survey exhibition that celebrates her boundary-pushing art practice as well as her important contributions to the Los Angeles art landscape as the creator of multiple permanent public artworks.

Including more than 50 pieces spanning from the early 2000s to the present, the exhibition explores her signature visual language that expands the possibilities of the mediums of printmaking, painting and papercutting.

The exhibition Sonia Romero: Taken Root was curated by Karen Rapp, Director & Curator, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, in fall 2023. The University of San Francisco is excited to bring this exhibition to Bay Area audiences.

About the Artist

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Sonia Romero (b. 1980, Los Angeles, CA) exemplifies the identity and lived experience of a “both/and” artist. She has cultivated her own artistic path that synthesizes her Chicano heritage traced through her father’s side (her father is artist Frank Romero) along with her Ashkenazi Jewish matrilineal line influenced by her grandmother, artist and art collector Edith Wyle—who was 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 childhood, Sonia Romero’s multi-ethnic upbringing has been formative to her development of an individual expression that transcends categories of belonging as well as art making.

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, CA; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles, CA; and Self Help Graphics and Art, Los Angeles, CA. Her works have also been featured in group exhibitions at the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; 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, CA. 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.

More About the Exhibition

Taken Root considers how Romero, known for her methodical, and sometimes playful, art-making processes, blurs distinctions between the mediums of painting and printmaking, creating varied and complex artworks that belie a mere surface reading. The artwork she produces—painted and collaged canvases, monoprints, linocuts and silkscreens as well as hand-painted tiles, embossed ceramics and laser-cut steel forms—could be best described as materially and technically intertwined.

Calling herself a painter first who studied all modes of printmaking as an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), it was her post-grad year-long tutelage under graphic artist Artemio Rodriguez at Self Help Graphics and Art that set her on a trajectory of mixing media. Her mastery of the linocut and its limitless possibilities of repetition, pattern and bold graphic qualities has blossomed into an ever-evolving 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.

The intertwining of media has generated multiple series of work that are, not surprisingly, also interrelated. Romero’s earliest pieces in the exhibition, produced after completing her BFA at RISD in 2002 and returning to Los Angeles, recall parables and tales passed down through children’s literature. After a year spent studying in Rome and interacting with visiting faculty like the late Paula Rego at RISD, Romero conjured stories about labor, fantasy and desire in her depictions of mostly female characters and narratives.

Long an astute observer and recounter of contemporary culture, Romero’s critiques and interpretations have sharpened as she addresses current issues of social, cultural and political significance. Some of the artist’s ongoing personal concerns are, for example, the consequences of human overconsumption and the need to tap into a state of inner wellbeing. Romero always expresses her perspectives through her distinctive graphic language that employs a set of recurring motifs—in particular trees, piles and the body—to represent the different states of reality that she is depicting.

Taken Root provides the first opportunity to consider her various bodies of work produced over the last twenty years in the context of one another.

— Karen Rapp, Director & Curator, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University