Carissa Samaniego is a visual artist, educator, amateur historian, and non-traditional philosophical thinker. She sees stories in materials, organizes thoughts in physical form, and uses the process of making as a way of knowing. This way of understanding the world led her to artmaking as a means of inquiry and storytelling. Her visual narratives are built with the craft traditions, local folklore, and social history of the places she lives and works. She uses heirloom quilts, piñatas, carved tree stumps, cotton, denim, cast porcelain, fabricated steel, neon lights, neologisms, taxidermy, junkyard scrap, religious figurines, ancient fossils, home videos and a range of other media to give form to an alternative, non-linear voice in the exploration of common age-old questions about values, faith, truth, purpose, power, and existence.

This work is driven by an endless fascination with trying to make sense of her own identity shaped from a collision of mismatched attachments to culture, place, and politics. She is an Oregon Trail millennial who grew up in rural America betwixt families deeply rooted on opposite sides of the country – in the northern lakes of Minnesota near the current US/CAN border and a desert town in Aridoamerica with a historically shifting relationship to the US/MEX border. She uses informal and formal systems of knowledge in her inquiries into the role of hybridity, difference, and place-based relationships in the construction of our identities.

Her visual research and studio practice are guided by a conceptual framework informed by a constellation of scholarship and creative work that includes: Gloria Anzaldua’s articulation of the nepantla condition and mestiza consciousness, Yi-Fu Tuan’s love of place, the intertwined relationship of ecology and culture highlighted by Gary Paul Nabhan, Wendell Berry’s agricultural philosophy, the writing on art and sense of place by Lucy Lippard, and Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene epoch. She creates artwork that functions in a space Anzaldua describes as, “the consciousness of the mixed blood born of live lived in the crossroads between races, nations, languages, genders, sexualities, and cultures, in an acquired subjectivity formed out of the transformation and relocation, movement guided by the learned capacity to read, renovate, and make signs on behalf of the dispossessed.”

Samaniego lives and works in Las Cruces, NM where she is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at New Mexico State University. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally in Mexico, S. Korea, and Europe. Recent project sites include Galerie Klatovy Klenova (CZ), Museo de Arte Ciudad Juárez (MEX), Border Art Residency (TX), Franconia Sculpture Park (MN), and Union Hall (CO). She has received awards from the INSITE Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Awesome Without Borders, the McKnight Foundation, Forecast Public Art, and International Sculpture Center. Currently, she is working on projects that explore newly adopted identities as she approaches middle-age, navigates parenthood, and establishes an academic career.