“Sangre Piteada 4,” 2025, woodcut and screenprint, 36 × 36 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Nancy Ariza
Teaching Artist Cohort
,
2026
Nancy Ariza is a Minnesota-based Mexican American visual artist and educator. Ariza draws from her Mexican heritage to explore themes of craft, cultural memory, familial ties, and migration. Blending traditional and alternative printmaking, natural pigments, and textiles, her work is grounded in cultural preservation. It seeks to sustain and examine the stories, crafts, and traditions of past generations in response to the physical and generational distance from ancestral homelands, heritage, and traditional knowledge. Through her studio practice, she reclaims, revives, and reinterprets these inherited traditions.
Ariza has exhibited across the United States at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco; Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University in Chico, California; Prospectus Gallery in Chicago; and Klemm Gallery at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan, among others. She has received awards from the McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Forecast Public Art, and Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.
With over 14 years of experience as an educator, Ariza currently teaches printmaking and book arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and leads the Teaching Artist Learning Community program at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, which she developed in 2023. She holds an MA in Education and a Graduate Certificate in Culturally Responsive Teaching from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, as well as a BFA in Printmaking and a BA in Art History from Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Selected works
“Sangre Piteada 1,” 2023, woodcut on fabric, 60 × 36 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Sangre Piteada 3,” 2024, woodcut and dry pigment screenprint, 28 × 22 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“El Artesano (The Artisan),” 2025, lithography, 32 × 48 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Cuando el Patrón se Convierte en una Constelación 3 (When the Pattern Becomes a Constellation 3),” 2025, screenprint and dry pigment screenprint on cochineal, marigold, and quebracho dyed paper, chine collé, 18 × 15 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“De Hilo a Hilo 1 (From Thread to Thread 1),” 2025, woodcut and dry pigment screenprint on fabric, cotton thread, 18 × 15 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Fragmentos de Piteado–Azul (Fragments of Piteado–Blue),” 2024, woodcut and dry pigment screenprint, 18 x 15 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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