MICHELLE ANGELA ORTIZ

Join us for the first comprehensive presentation of artist Michelle Angela Ortiz’s public-facing projects and studio practice spanning her 25-year career. Recognized and celebrated for her community-forward projects that have included light projections, oral history collection, and murals, Ortiz works closely with her family, her neighbors, and wider immigrant communities in Philadelphia and around the world to share stories of humanity and resilience in the face of oppression. In her studio work, she mines her own familial cultural heritage and its rich tapestry of intergenerational traditions that she both carries forth and reimagines for the future. Throughout, the power of storytelling forms the heart of Ortiz’s approach as both a means of visibility and a tool of resistance. Wending its way between individual narratives and collective experience, STORIES OF US, will reveal the porosity between the personal and political during the Semiquincentennial of the United States, revealing one as inextricable from the other in the pursuit of freedom, dignity, and belonging.

Dedicated to activism and action, Ortiz has strategically sited her public works across urban sites such as government buildings, storefronts, and sidewalks. Grounding her work with community members in resilience, she turns structures of authority into sites of reclamation and productive encounter. Highlights of these collaborative actions and art works will include significant and pioneering projects such as her 2015 protest work outside of Philadelphia’s ICE building; images of immigrant families that were projected onto City Hall in Philadelphia or installed at the Capitol Building in Harrisburg; and billboards, film, and paintings featuring the words of mothers who had been detained and separated from their children when crossing the border into the United States. Ortiz’s profound and prolific work as a painter and muralist will also be on view.

Learning from an early age from her family that the complex histories that people carry inform both their unique perspectives and their lived realities and freedoms, Ortiz has developed a deeply thoughtful studio practice examining her own identity. An alumna of Moore College of Art and Design—where she earned her BFA in 2000—she began interrogating the relationship between her family’s past and her experience of the present with early prints and sketches, some of which will be on view for the first time, that presaged the focus and intention of her mature work. With a Puerto Rican father and Colombian mother, Ortiz delves into her family’s stories of belonging, immigration, and connections to places spread across diasporic roots throughout the Americas. Objects imbued with personal stories and cultural significance play central roles in her videos and sculptures, turning everyday tools of life into conduits for holding and honoring chronicles of survival and strength. Along with previous works that explore the significance of these items, the exhibition will premiere a suite of new works created by Ortiz during an upcoming artist residency in Cartagena, Colombia.

Driven by principles of co-creation and self-reflection, Ortiz believes that sharing our stories can promote understanding and empathy. Her pioneering methods for convening, communicating, and collaborating with and across a wide range of communities have called into question whose stories are told, whose are believed, and whose are venerated. Ortiz points to existing inequities and the precarious access to freedoms for those who are silenced, denied, and rejected. From her intimate familial circle to the national conversation, Ortiz turns her collaborators’ voices and her own into a rising chorus calling out their—and our—right to belong, to be heard, and to exist. By doing so, she asks us to become active participants in the production of history through the lens of our own lived experiences.

I have had the privilege of knowing Michelle for my many years in Philadelphia — as an inspired artist and as a committed neighbor in my own South Philadelphia community. Relentlessly dedicated to her community and to her collaborators, she is a force of nature whose full artistic output has yet to be seen together in the way we are envisioning for this special exhibition. I am thrilled to bring her various projects and artworks to light and to life at The Galleries at Moore in her alma mater.

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