Sandra Mayo Exhibition / Day of Remembrance for Truth & Justice

"Traits of Resiliency / Trazos de Resiliencia" - Thursday, March 23rd, 6pm - Consulate General of Argentina in New York

About this event

Sandra Mayo is an Argentinean artist and educator (Ed.M.) who lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. She specializes in printmaking and mixed media. Sandra has developed a unique visual language using genograms to follow and probe the emotional history of families, including trauma and human rights abuses. Her art aims to provoke profound emotional and intellectual bonds with the viewer’s mind connecting them with current sociopolitical events.

The current exhibition is: "Traits of Resiliency / Trazos de Resiliencia"

"In 2016, I was fortunate to attend the testimony of Sara Rus. Sara is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Argentina in 1945. Some 30 years later, Sara’s son Daniel disappeared in the Argentina’s Dirty War. After the shock of learning Sara’s story, I researched for other families who might survived these two tragic social traumas; the Holocaust and the Dirty War. Ruth Paradeis experienced a similar and also deeply moving history. In her autobiography De Auschwitz al Olimpo she narrates her escape from Germany to Argentina in 1939 leaving her family behind, all of whom perished in the Holocaust. Ruth’s son Marcelo, her daughter-in-law Susana, and many of their friends also disappeared in the Dirty War. How did these women find resiliency?

I use Genograms (symbolic relational symbols used by therapists and researchers) as my main pictorial language. I created new symbols for human rights and social trauma that were missing from the commonly used catalog of Genograms. My art media is printing. I create monoprints, and silkscreens on handmade papers. These mixed materials are light and delicate, yet very stable and strong. Their purpose is to absorb marks, traces, and stitches in an attempt to capture traits of the human experience. This exhibition brings Sara’s and Ruth’s voices back. Both combine the dark and the bright side of survival".

Sandra Mayo