Ada Medina

Ada Medina is versatile with several art forms. Her practice over the years includes drawing, painting, and mixed-media sculpture, each for long and intensive periods. Underpinning this range of work is her primary relationship with the inquiring and revelatory nature of drawing.

Medina builds her sculptural work with care and attention while knowing that the discrete object is not her central aim. The vitality and poetics of her work are found in that hidden moment, where the seemingly irreconcilable material/immaterial, abstract/referential, formalism/animism, rawness/nuance support each other as a totality with no separation. Using materials such as wood, paper, paint, stain, leather, earth, wool and wax, Medina’s work offers both the unexpected and the deeply familiar.

Medina’s creative endeavors include her previous teaching as Associate Professor at Drake University, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Residing now in Santa Fe, Medina focuses on artmaking. She sustains an ongoing interest in teaching by mentoring other artists. Medina is a recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Medina’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Mint Museum of Art; and the Equitable Life Assurance Society (New York), among other museum, public and private collections.

“I am interested in the physical and non-physical containing each other, and in realizing an unsettled, unsettling form that is object and non-object, resisting single or rigid interpretations.”

www.klaudiamarrgallery.com
www.artwomen.org

This bio/description was originally published in 2005 and updated in 2013. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).