Visiting Artist Workshop with Roberto Torres Mata

Exploring personal identity and culture through screenprinting, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Art and Art History at Hope College.

Wisconsin-based Artist, Roberto Torres Mata, led our crew of high school and college students in a 2-day workshop this weekend. We worked with an expressive, spontaneous method of screen preparation, drawing images and textures directly onto screens with brushes. The resulting multi-layered prints are a bit dreamy and abstract, like fragments or impressions of memories. Much of Roberto’s work focuses on themes of identity, culture, migration, and navigation, so we’re mulling over these idea as we work.

What images come to mind when you consider the places you’ve lived and the people/culture you’re connected most deeply to? If you were asked to tell the story of who you are and where you’ve come from in petroglyphs or pictographs, what might it look like?  Work from this 3-day workshop will be exhibited alongside Roberto’s work in 2023 at Hope College’s DePree Art Gallery.

We’re so grateful to the Mellon Foundation for funding this workshop and exhibition, in collaboration with the Department of Art and Art History at Hope College.

In my practice, I examine both human and animal migration as metaphors for one another. Migration—the ability to move freely in search of our fullest and best selves—is a fundamental right. My work raises awareness of the dire need to protect both migrants and the animal species that depend on migratory routes for survival.  Through my work, I direct attention to these complex issues within the scope of displacement. To destigmatize migration, I take a multimedia approach realized through the metaphors as symbols and icons to identify historical precedent. The work embodies an emotional sense of realities of human displacement as well as the routes animals depend on for long-distance movement for survival.  We are navigators, together we take paths to find solidarity with the promise for a better life. In our journey I believe we can help shape the dialogue around migration while removing barriers of division and promoting compassion and humanity.