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Aida Lizalde (Virginia Commonwealth University) is a recipient of the 2023 Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

Aida Lizalde is a Mexican artist whose practice is deeply rooted in their cultural background, immigration experience, and upbringing in a multi-faceted agricultural family project that included raising goats, and honeybees, and harvesting pecans. Their work explores themes of metabolization, the inner workings of the body, and the struggles to metabolize the vast array of data that it processes in relation to post-colonization, generational memory, identity, disease, and trauma.

Through systems that drip, rot, and dissolve, Lizalde investigates the complex interplay between the physical and the psychological, and the natural and the artificial, alongside the potential for harmony and failure in these relationships.

Lizalde’s use of materials arises from sensorial memories of their upbringing, such as digging their hand into a bucket of raw beans, scraping the yellowing crust of handmade cheese, or kicking the red clumps of dirt off their shoes in their grandfather’s ranch. Lizalde’s sculptures and installations are created using ceramics, found objects, and biomatter such as milk, pinto beans, hair, bacterial cultures, and guajillo peppers. They are hybrids that exist in spaces of transformation like a stomach becoming a tree trunk, an intestine becoming a territorial marker, or a pot becoming an anthropomorphic machine.