Madelline Vicencio. Working in HTX, b. 1996
Madelline Vicencio is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in Houston, TX. She acquired her BFA from the University of Houston alongside a minor in Motion Media. Her work could be found throughout Houston. Most notably, at Houston’s Czech Center Museum, her mural, “Color Over the Border,” binds text with bold and symbolic colors in support of migration within Texas. Vicencio has been an artist in residence at TEXERE, Oaxaca, MX, and Casa Lü, Mexico City, MX. In Mexico, she worked to explore her interests in fabric arts and identity.
Her work personifies a self-identified foundation between the United States and Mexico. This middle ground represents an inhabitable space open to express the unconventional nature of a Mexican-American. As a Houstonian, raised by a Mexican mother, Vicencio has struggled to feel secure in spaces that fail to recognize her stir of Tex-Mex. With that, she constructs textured surfaces fabricated with cloth, threads, plaster, and paint. She skillfully blends her personal narrative with inherited anxieties from her upbringing and powerful Mesoamerican symbolism and textiles.
Vicencio often classifies her painting style as “primal expressionism” which she defines as the free expression of raw emotions and raw materials onto her pieces. Raw materials refer to her aspiration to create zero-waste artwork by utilizing second-hand fabrics and tools readily available from her home. Primal could also be used to describe her workstation, an outdoor studio open to the full range of motion and close to nature.
Currently, Madelline Vicencio is working on expanding her artistic vision as she dives deeper into understanding her ancestral history and continues to experiment with craft arts. Outside of her art practice, she is in partnership with the online circular fashion studio, Dolores Design Studio. Dolores Design Studio was founded in Houston, Texas as a means to provide information on circular fashion and sustainability by collaborating art and fashion with recycling and craftsmanship.