Over the last few years Brownsville-born, Houston-based artist Verónica Gaona has been a rising star of the Texas art scene. She has received the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award (2023) and Chispa Award (2022) from the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, and the Houston Artadia Award (2021). Since 2019, she has participated in residencies in Nantes, France; Marfa, Houston, and Brownsville, Texas; and Brooklyn, New York. Gaona’s work has been exhibited at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Amarillo Art Museum, the Rockport Center for the Arts, Burlington City Arts in Vermont, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tamaulipas in Matamoros, Mexico, the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in San Diego, California, and most recently as part of Flow States – La Trienal 2024 at El Museo del Barrio in New York.
After seeing her work in Fort Worth as part of the second iteration of Soy de Tejas and then again at El Museo del Barrio, I spoke with Gaona about shifting her practice from photography to more sculpture and installation based and the recent residencies she has participated in. Read an edited version of our conversation below.
Verónica Gaona. Photograph by Maria Mora Martinez/Courtesy of International Studio for Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, New York, 2024
Jessica Fuentes (JF): I’m most familiar with your more recent sculptures, but, looking through your website I see that you have a BA in Mass Communications and an MFA in Photography. Tell me a little bit about your interest and work in photography and what brought about your shift toward installation, performance, and sculpture.
Verónica Gaona (VG): I started as a self-taught photographer. I took photographs of my immediate surroundings, such as the people around me, the landscapes, the Rio Grande River, and the people who were seeking asylum from Latin America into the United States. I was young at that point, and I wanted to change the world’s problems. So, I decided to pursue a BA in Mass Communication with a focus on print journalism to improve my writing skills. I grew up speaking Spanish at home and learned English at school. I struggled to communicate growing up, and I was always speaking Spanglish or speaking it incorrectly. Since I was pretty good at taking photographs already, I thought I would use this opportunity to learn how to write better in order to accompany the photographs that I was taking with objective, newsworthy text.
After that, in the summer of 2018, I worked as a photographer for La Union del Pueblo Entero, which is a social justice organization that encouraged civic engagement and also fought for basic infrastructure in rural South Texas colonias, which are neighborhoods in rural areas. In the fall of 2018, I decided that I wanted to pursue an MFA in studio art, with a concentration in photography at the University of Houston. That art program encouraged me to have a multidisciplinary approach. At that time I was focused on photography, but I wanted to extend my ideas into immersive installations, sculptures, and performances.
I continued to take photographs, but I combined my visual research with fieldwork in remote areas around the U.S.-Mexico border and other places I visited frequently. At that point, my art practice was shifting a little bit because I was learning all these contemporary art genres and approaches to art making.
JF: Were there particular artists that inspired you to what shaped that desire to shift?
VG: There are several artists that inspired me, but it was a general sort of realization. I didn’t know this type of work existed. It was a real learning experience for me, and I was just taking it in and trying to understand why I had this itch in me, like it was something that I wanted to do beyond just a photograph.
I was fascinated by the immersive and experiential feeling of the artworks I was learning about in school. I liked the multiplicity of responses and experiences that installation, sculpture, and performance could trigger by the positioning of objects or a performative gesture staged in a public space. I liked how these new forms of art provided new alternative ways of addressing the viewer, and left more room for the viewer to come up with their own ideas about the work and maybe even challenge them. So I got hooked on that, and I continued taking photographs, and I was still conducting field research in different communities in order to create art with these new mediums.
What really excited me was the presentation — the conceptual and the aesthetic ways of making this contemporary art — while still speaking about socio-political issues and experiences that I grew up living, that I felt compelled to respond to. So in a sense, I was still doing investigative journalism, because while I was doing these immersive types of works, it required me to go into the field, do field research, gather material, and then take it into the studio and conceptualize it. It was more visual and creative, even though it wasn’t photographic and traditional journalistic images.
JF: So photography remained part of your research practice but you were not presenting your images in a traditional documentary style?
VG: Yes. In the process, I learned that these mediums allowed me to counter the exposure and the publication of violence and racism against Mexicans and other Latin American communities that were migrating to the United States. And this type of work also revealed to me other spatial and temporal aspects of these experiences that a photographic image cannot do sometimes because the photograph can be a bit distant.
Verónica Gaona, “For those who do not return in life, there is always death (Homage to David Gomez),” 2022, Ford F-150 burnout photo performance inkjet matte print, 3.344 x 5 inches
Verónica Gaona, “For those who do not return in life, there is always death (Homage to David Gomez),” 2021, Ford F-150 burnout photo performance inkjet matte print, 16 x 20 inches
JF: Some of your recent sculptures speak to car culture. Tell me a little about this decision. How does that language illuminate the themes in your work?
VG: I’m not sure if my work can be understood in the linear historical culture as it is understood today, but it does reference it, and it sets itself apart from it. At the same time, I don’t want to come to a conclusion about it yet, because there’s so much that I still want to create and reflect on. I tend to follow the work and it reveals to me as I spend more time with it in the studio.
The idea of the truck, the symbol of the truck, was already in the ideas and experiences of my early work, but the material, or the depiction of it, did not appear until December 2020. I have made work in a variety of forms with the truck since then. One of my first pieces was a back window with tinted glass and text on the floor. After that, I staged a vehicular burnout that was documented as a photo performance. Then in 2022, I started to explore the material of a truck by creating photographic wall-mounted sculptures.
As an artist moving through the world, taking into account how one encounters a photo is essential to creating and unpacking how art and photos rest in one’s experience. I was thinking about that, and returned to photos again, with the material of the truck, and some of my sculptures are made of photos — photos of family who are laboring in fields, specifically my family — and truck metal. I’m interested in collaging and abstracting the printed photos on the trucks’ colored metal. With the material, I attempt to evoke the ideas of impermanence as it relates to migration and the spatial implications of remittances, which is money sent by migrants working abroad to their home country.
This work usually is installed on the wall, but sometimes it moves onto the floor in an installation format. I think about migration, memorialization, and intangible aspects of desire, of wanting to work and build a home, the spatial implications of money transactions, and the loss that the family experiences through this long process. Sometimes these long-term projects take over someone’s lifetime. It’s a whole lifetime practice.
Verónica Gaona, “To know and to dream at the same time,” 2022, Ford F-150 body parts, aluminum sheets, archived prints on aluminum sheets, vinyl, dimensions variable. Detail view of “To know and to dream at the same time.” Photograph courtesy of the artist
JF: Yes, it’s easy for people to start on a path of labor and remittances for a specific purpose and then to get into a routine, or a system where they might feel locked in.
VG: Right, because for a lot of people it’s become so normalized within family units. That distance, longing, grief, and going back and forth, has become so normalized that they don’t even question it anymore. By collaging and abstracting these photographs with the truck parts, I’m interested in that movement of families and the social relations. The vehicle, the truck, is usually used for labor, and it’s used for labor because a lot of people carry their tools in it, or they carry other items that they need to move during the day. So, I grabbed that because it’s something that I would see in my family and my immediate community, and I was also seeing how my family members were constructing homes at a distance.
I grew up with family members who were construction workers. They work grueling jobs for little pay and what caught my attention was that they were working in the United States, living in poor conditions, in small houses, and then investing back in their home country, in Mexico. I thought that dynamic and that transition was interesting. I started to research about it, and it all clicked to me at that point. I feel like there’s so much for me to still create and understand, but a lot of it has been sort of materialized in these different art mediums, like the sculptures, the performances, the truck parts on the wall, they’re all about the same ideas, but they all point to different aspects.
I become really obsessive about my work, I like to work in series and really investigate things. Right now, the work that has a lot for me to investigate is the truck work because of the color, the photographs, and the form… There’s so much I can do with it.
Verónica Gaona,
“Migrant Metropolis, To know and to dream at the same time,” 2023, Ford F-150 body parts, aluminum sheets, archived photos on aluminum sheets, dimensions variable. Installation view of Here Now: Art and Migration at BCA Center, Vermont. Photograph by Liza Voll/Courtesy of BCA Center, Vermont
JF: Yes, it’s been interesting to see the different ways you are exploring that material, and it feels a little limitless, which is exciting. I want to switch gears a little though and talk about some of the awards you’ve received recently.
VG: I was just out of grad school when I received the Houston Artadia Award. I did not think I was going to get it. I decided to apply because I didn’t have anything lined up after grad school. When I did get it, it gave me confidence about my practice and it also connected me to local artists in Houston, as well as artists working on a national level.
JF: Since then, you were also a recipient of two US Latinx Art Forum awards. Tell me a little about those awards and what they entailed.
VG: In 2023, I received the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award. The Fellowship was from June 2023 to May 2024. For that year, I had optional monthly meetings with the cohort to create meaningful exchanges, and build a sense of community… In 2022, I also got a micro grant from USLAF, and I participated in a micro studio visit in the form of a three to five-minute video. This studio visit was an opportunity to share my practice with teachers, curators, organizers, and others. They asked me to present some of my art, but I decided to present on a book called The Remittance Landscape, by Sarah Lynn Lopez, who is an architectural historian researching the material and spatial characteristics of hybrid remittance homes. The book includes a lot of ideas that ground my work.
JF: That’s incredible. And, aside from these awards, over the last few years, you have also participated in a number of residencies. Can you talk a little about the importance of these programs?
VG: Residencies are a great way to get away from your usual routine and focus on your art practice while meeting other like-minded individuals, connecting with people, and visiting new places. Making art requires all of those things and in these different residencies, I learned how to work on a cohesive body of work or presentation. I learned how to put an exhibition together for presentation with a variety of different works. I learned what I want to say and how to work with curators and writers because they all work together.
I collaborated with curators during these residencies. For example, at the Lawndale art residency, they gave me the opportunity to hire a writer so they could write an essay for my small catalog… I liked that experience because it allowed me to step back and let someone else look at the work for me and let them have their own voice about it, too. And I love that, because sometimes, as an artist, we get in our heads about the work, and have a much broader look about the art and its relationship to society.
One of my most recent residencies was at PAC in Houston. I came into it with a plan because I wanted to expand Spanning Worlds, which is a series of rebars that is now on view at El Museo del Barrio’s Trienal. So, when I came into that residency I was pretty compulsive with the work, I worked on that piece until the last day of the residency and then I went to New York for the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) residency.
Verónica Gaona. Photo: Beatriz Bellorin/Courtesy PAC Residency, Houston, 2024
Verónica Gaona, “Spanning Worlds,” 2022 – 2024
JF: What was that experience like? How long were you in New York?
VG: I was there for three months. I worked on one project but had many studio visits with curators and reconnected with friends and arts professionals. I also engaged with the Brooklyn and New York area through public programs. At the end of the residency, I had a public program where I presented my research and the body of work I was making there. Overall, it was a great experience, and now, I’ve been invited to be in a group show in 2026 and I will participate in the upcoming ISCP Benefit Auction. Even though I’ve concluded my residency, I’ll continue to engage with the organization.
JF: After IACP, you participated in the Flower Shop residency, in Brownsville. What was it like switching between those very different experiences? What is the benefit of participating in a smaller residency like the Flower Shop?
VG: I think there are residences for everything. There are residencies to go work and finalize a project, residencies to do research and connect with people, residencies to do public programming, etc. So, after my ISCP residency, I wanted to return to Brownsville for a month in order to be back home, be with family, and slow down a bit. I wanted to restart, but I also wanted to participate within the community and be a part of some of the programs that the Flower Shop hosts.
While I was in the residency, I went back to my alma mater and participated in an artist talk where I presented my art practice to students at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville. After the presentation, I spent time talking with the students, learning about their work, and providing feedback. I felt like that residency was a good way to get back and connect with my friends and the community. A reset, because I was away for a long time.
JF: Your last few years have been hugely successful. What advice would you give to emerging artists as they are considering their paths forward?
VG: Don’t get in the way of yourself, like I did. Follow your gut, play and work hard. We have to find a balance, if not, we get tired.
