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About the Artist
Elena Baca was born, 1969, in Albuquerque. She earned both Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from the University of New Mexico, in Printmaking and Photography respectively. She has been awarded The University of New Mexico’s Friends of Art Prize, 1997. She also is an exhibitor at the Contemporary Spanish Market, Santa Fe. Elena Baca is an adjunct faculty member in the School of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. She also works in an Albuquerque video production company.
Artist’s Statement
I started Graduate school three months after a car accident, in which I broke my pelvis in three places and my tail bone. This was only the first in a series of events which influence and shape the images I make. Two friends died of AIDS related complications within the same year. One of my closest aunts, was in a coma and suffered memory loss. My mother and aunts made the painful decision to place my Grandmother in a nursing home. All of these things are just a part of life. They are the painful moments that we (my family and friends) must learn from, that must come to teach us to feel the good, and to appreciate every minute. They are also the things that you would never think would bring you joy, happiness, an intensity so rare.
The way I learned to understand these moments, to look beyond what they seemed, came through fiction. It was through authors like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Rudolfo Anaya, Ana Castillo and Denise Chavez—just to name a few—that I learned to trust my ideas. Their novels and stories put into words how I continue to feel.
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