Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Fuentes.
Jessica, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Growing up, I always thought I would be an engineer. I loved math, science, and computers, and actively put off taking art classes for as long as I could. I took my first art class in my junior year of high school and it changed my life. I found that through art, I could process and express my thoughts and feelings in a way I wasn’t able to do previously. Instead of becoming an engineer, I ended up going to UTDallas and earning a degree in Art & Performance. After graduating, I still didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. Through a series of unexpected events, I took a summer internship at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That experience opened my mind to the possibility of a career in art museum education. I returned to Texas and taught middle school art for a few years before attending UNT to earn my MA in Art Education with a Museum Education certificate. While working on my thesis, I accepted a full-time position at the Dallas Museum of Art. I worked there in the Center for Creative Connections for a little over six years, all the while commuting from Fort Worth. In 2018, I was brought on as Manager of School & Community Outreach at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in my hometown. Since then, I have been working diligently to lead our teaching team in rethinking our curriculum with a focus on telling the stories of diverse artists in the Carter’s collection and broadening the idea of what it means to be an American artist.
All throughout this time, I have always been working on my own art. Creating art is an important part of how I process the world around me. I have shown my work throughout the DFW area for over a decade. Being both an artist and a mother, my work is often influenced by my children. Through layered and distorted film photographs, I explore the distortion of time and memory. Currently, I am an artist-in-residence at TCC South Campus and I have a solo exhibition on view at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The biggest struggle has been balancing the things that are important to me: my family, my work, and my art. My oldest daughter was four years old when I started graduate school and it was important to me to make time to focus on her. One way I accomplished this was to include her as a co-researcher on my thesis project. We explored art museums together as a family and we both wrote and reflected on our experiences together. My thesis highlighted her voice and ended up winning the Most Innovative Thesis award from the UNT Libraries. As I continue down my path of creating art, working full time, and being a mother, I am always looking for creative solutions to involve my daughters in the things that are important to me and to value their opinions and experiences.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I’m both an artist and an art educator. As an educator, my focus has always been engaging and supporting local communities. At the Dallas Museum of Art, I helped to create the C3 Visiting Artist Project, which invites local artists to apply for an opportunity to create a participatory installation and collaborate with the education team to co-create programs. At the Carter, I helped to create a similar program called Carter Community Artists. Through this initiative, the museum commits to working with four local artists for a year. Throughout the year, the artists meet with the education team to provide insight and feedback about programming ideas. Carter Community Artists have played a major role in the programming for K-12th grade audiences by helping to shape our school tour curriculum and leading repeat visit programs for after school and summer care facilities. These repeat-visit programs are also an important aspect of the work my team and I do to engage with local communities.
Regarding my art, one of the things that I think I am becoming known for is my zines. I created my first zine to accompany my first solo exhibition, “Tree House Divided” at Gallery 76102. The zine, “Tree House Divided: A Transparent Zine,” was intended to make the art more accessible by putting it in a format that people could easily afford and that multiple people could purchase. This first zine was unique because it was composed on transparent paper. The idea was that as you flip through the pages, the composition changes and the viewer could opt to look at one page at a time or layer a few pages to create a new composition. My second zine was titled, “My Only Homeland: An Unfoldable Zine,” and accompanied a body of work I created in 2018.
The full-size works of art were large scale photographs printed on vinyl adhesive and layered on top of each other to create the final composition. Through the zine, I was able to give the viewer a peek inside each composition. Each page is folded to create the final composition but can also be unfolded to reveal the hidden parts of each image. Finally, my most recent zine, “Duo Means Two: A Reversible Zine,” was created to accompany my most recent solo exhibition at Fort Worth Community Arts Center. This body of work is made up of photographs taken over 14 years of pairs of objects. The exhibition has 20 images on view, so through the zine, I wanted to show a fuller view of the body of work. The zine is composed like a “one-page” zine, one large piece of paper that folds down to create a booklet with no binding. What makes this one unique is that the zine can be unfolded, flipped inside out, and refolded to reveal additional images and Spanish text.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
To me, success is about evolving and growing. I think it is incredibly important not to get stuck in a particular way of doing something. In my art, career, and personal life, I feel successful when I learn something new and adapt.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jessicafuentes.com
- Email: jessicaannfuentes@gmail.com
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/jessicafuentes83
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