Could you introduce yourself?
Sure. My name is Eileen Jimenez. I use they and she pronouns. I am Ñätho. I’ll also bring my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother into this space. My mom was Maria Cruz Jimenez. My grandmother was Eloisa Saavedra, and my great-grandmother was Isidora Saveedra. Usually I have their portraits behind me, but they sold in a recent gallery show. I want to redo them so they’re here with me again.
To start us off, could you talk briefly about your work using public art and social media to help Black, brown and Indigenous folks share messages of resistance?
I’ve been doing art my whole life, but I’ve been doing it more intentionally in the last couple years. In 2018 I started my Instagram, and I had maybe 60 people following me—my friends and family. It’s been wild connecting with more and more people through art. I think of art as my journal. I process therapy, readings, work drama—through art. It’s been really cool to see other people resonate with the things I make. I have this piece that says, Community is the most effective form of rebellion. I carved it after I read the line in a book and printed it on this random wrinkled paper, because I needed to see it printed. When I posted it, it got 12,000 likes. I’ve made murals. One says, This is native land. Another one says, You are my other me, in Spanish, and has an image of my mom hugging a heron. It’s really cool to make things that are meaningful to me and see them resonate with other people.
What does it mean for you to conceive of art-making as resistance?
When I first was trying to be intentional about sharing my art, it was mostly portraits of women of color. I wanted to make stuff for my classroom that I couldn’t buy anywhere. Those portraits are more accessible now, but back then I couldn’t find quotes from bell hooks with her portrait and basket. So I made them. That’s how my intentional art sharing started. Now my art is about a message I want to share, usually the stories of my community or my family. I have a piece that says, They want us to learn their stories so we forget our own. Art-making as resistance feels like refusing to forget our stories. Sometimes it feels repetitive, saying the same thing over and over again—we want liberation, we love each other—in different ways so people can hear it.
You’ve said that if resistance doesn’t involve love, it’s not resistance. Could you talk about what it means to you to see love as a deep, necessary part of resistance?
Most of the lessons I learned in my family were taught through stories and sayings, and one of the things I remember my mom talking about again and again is: everything you have and everything you gain is for your community. In the university where I work, I think about this regularly. I’m a dean, and I talk to my faculty about how important it is for our students to feel loved and cared for by their professors. And I do it through art, too. It feels really central to me: there is nothing if there isn’t love. Feeling loved and cared for is the foundation of everything.
You use linocut—how does that art form intersect with your desires and visions for your art?
I learned how to do linocut at a 101, weekend workshop. It was me and six old, retired, white ladies. I was making this embroidery that’s the style of my people, and everybody else was making Christmas cards for their kids. I used to draw and paint, but it wasn’t until Iinocut that I felt like I could say the things I wanted to say. Since then, I’ve done it every single day. Sometimes it’s hard, and printmaking is pretty elitist, but for me, it’s always grounded in how I use this form to say what I want to say. I’ve connected to some printmaking, linocut movements in Oaxaca, for example, where they use lino to make murals. Those spaces are more aligned with my practice, more about saying what our people want to say and less about making a perfect print.
How do you decide what words and images to pair?
I have a folder of things I come across, things I don’t know how to carve yet or words I don’t have an image for yet. I feel really drawn to waterfalls, for example, to this concept of water wanting to return to itself. But I don’t have the image for that concept yet. The pairing feels like a puzzle—the words have to fit with the image, and the colors, and even the paper. The images often have deep significance for me. I do a lot of hands. That’s my family. I do a lot of plants and nature. The land is a medicine that felt really sacred to my family growing up, that I didn’t understand until I was older, and printing images of the land feels like a way of honoring that connection. Sometimes I print fruit. Somewhere—I think it was in Braiding Sweetgrass—Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how fruit is plants’ gift to us. The other day, I was taking a walk, and I found a fig near my house, and I opened it and held it in my hand, knowing immediately that I wanted to print the image of that fig in my hand. When I got home, I put it in my in my folder. The composition is a process even I don’t fully understand. I just know I want each print to feel connected to the land, to colors, and to joy.
There’s another piece you have that I wanted to ask about–Cúrate con los besos que te sopla el viento (feature image for this post). [Heal yourself with the kisses the wind blows you.] What was the inspiration for that piece?
That’s a song lyric. I learned recently there’s a neurodivergent urge to listen to the same song over and over and over again. I do that. Sometimes creating art with the lyrics that feel so resonant to me, that I listen to over and over again, feels like a way to complete the listening. In Spanish, a healer is called a curandera. That song is about a woman who’s a curandera, and she talks about how you heal yourself through plant medicine and things like that. To me that song is resistance, because when I’m out in nature and feel the wind in my hair or my face, my anxiety lessens, and for a moment I’m just thinking, Oh, this feels so good. Oh, I’m going to be okay and everything’s going to be okay.
Is art-making a communal practice for you?
It’s a bit of everything. I’m relearning my language, and recently I met up with a couple other Hñähñu
people in Seattle, and I showed them how to do carving, and we cocreated this piece with some of our embroidery, which says in our language, in not a nice way, Shut up, colonizer. But unless you know our language you don’t know that. We laughed so hard making it. I also do a lot of community workshops, especially with youth. I was just at Muckleshoot Tribal College last week, and it’s always amazing to me to see how excited people feel printing the blocks they create. I love that like palpable joy in the air when we’re making art together, especially with people who have been told they’re not good artists, not good enough. If your art is doing what it needs to do for you and your community, it’s good enough, it’s good.
Find workshops and other opportunities with Eileen at www.eileenjimenez.com or follow them on Instagram at maese.art.by.eileen.jimenez.
