Cinco de Mayo

CELESTE CONTRERAS

For Cinco de Mayo, we are proud to present some of the work of a UWM MFA student who has spent a considerable amount of time in our Special Collections in her 3-year graduate career at UW-Milwaukee. Celeste Contreras is a Xicana-Indigenous artist and activist from Milwaukee who works in a variety of media and narrative forms, such as drawing, painting, printmaking, illustration, installation, animation, public art, and especially artists books. The images shown here come from two of her publications:

Artist in the Library, published in a limited edition of 200 copies in 2019, is a three-volume set created as a reflection of her time as the 2019 artist-in-residence at the Mitchell Street Branch of the Milwaukee Public Library.

Cuicatl Xochitl (Song Flower), an artists book produced in an edition of three copies in 2021, presents a series of ghost images; they are so light they are barely there (we had to really enhance the images to make them visible here). The prompt for the visual narrative is based on the cuicatl, the flowering symbol that emerges from the mouth signifying voice. Of this book, Contreras writes:

Sometimes we lose our voices; in transmission -- in translation. Sometimes we disappear. But if you look at a certain angle -- it's right there before your eyes. This book is about erasure and impermanence. . . . Though the actual images are barely there, those who want to see will see and those who do not look they might not see it.

In her practice, Contreras establishes herself as a contemporary Tlacuilo -- a scribe, bookmaker, storyteller -- a common visual element throughout her current work. This choice is not surprising, especially in her very specific connection to our Special Collections: Contreras chose to do her MFA work at UWM specifically to work with our department head Max Yela, who is also on graduate faculty in the Department of Art & Design with a specialty in the book as an art medium. 

Contreras recently completed the installation of her graduate thesis exhibition and it is fantastic! She will be defending her thesis later this month. Congratulations Celeste!!