About Melissa Calderón
“Melissa Calderón masterfully stitches together the essence of her Bronx upbringing and Puerto Rican heritage through intricate embroidery. Utilizing beige linen as her canvas, she transforms familiar scenes into textured landscapes, capturing the evolving nature of neighborhoods and the displacement of long-standing residents. Her work reflects the profound changes affecting both the Bronx and Puerto Rico, illustrating a place caught between historical identity and ongoing transformation.
Her technique emphasizes texture to convey deeper meanings, with layered stitching and unraveling threads symbolizing resilience, adaptation, and loss. The intricate embroidery, rich in detail, transforms everyday objects and spaces into emotionally charged representations of shifting communities. Through her approach, Calderón highlights the impact of gentrification, migration, and economic struggle, weaving together narratives that resonate beyond personal history.
The artist’s creative process is deeply personal and meditative, rooted in a tradition passed down through generations. Each piece begins with a drawing, transferred to a pattern, and then embroidered by hand. This meticulous approach recalls childhood moments spent sewing with her grandmother, transforming embroidery into a space for reflection and preservation. Through her work, Calderón honors the memories of places and people, ensuring their presence remains stitched into history.”
Statement
I create bodies of conceptual work that focus on the social philosophical aspects of historical (re)memory, privilege, and consequence. My multi-media approach allows me to make work from various vantage points unencumbered by medium.
I received my art education from my own school of practical art experience that I call the "Mott Haven Art School"; a playful reference to my 17+ years living and working in the South Bronx artist community. With no formal art training, I researched and critiqued like a wry sociologist, figuring out my own path to creating work that allows me to speak of issues that affect not only me but the community in which I come from.
For over 15 years I have dedicated my practice to using embroidery - A skill taught to me as a child, passed down through generations of Puerto Rican seamstresses - to reinterpret and renegotiate this familial skill into a visual language of labor. Through the use of historical allusion, this work weaves a generational history and retrospection of Puerto Rican home needleworking by referencing the postcolonial industrialization they were and are subjected to. It speaks to continued modern-day demands of labor, worker subjectivity, and inherent socioeconomic realities.
Bio
Self-taught multimedia artist Melissa Calderón creates bodies of conceptual work around central themes exploring social and political landscapes, drawing upon historical and philosophical references of power, fragility and perception. She has exhibited her work at El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Portland Museum of Art, The Schomburg Center, Arsenal de la Puntilla and Galería 20/20, SmackMellon, CUNY Hunter College, among others. In 2023, she had a solo micro retrospective of embroidery works - All the Unheard - at Espacio Reunión in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Melissa is a PEPATIAN artist; a South Bronx-based organization dedicated to creating, producing and supporting contemporary multi-disciplinary art by Latino & Bronx-based artists founded by visual artist Pepon Osorio and dancer/choreographer Merian Soto. Her work has been recently included in Public Art in Public Spaces published by Madison Square Park Conservancy and Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics by Arlene Davila.
In 2019, Calderón completed a new monument funded by the City of New York’s Percent for Art Commission’s Monument Fund, becoming the first Latina to create a monument for the New York City. Para Roberto, dedicated to humanitarian and baseball player Roberto Clemente, is permanently installed in the South Bronx and won a NYC Public Design Commission’s 38th Annual Award for Excellence in Design. She was born and raised in The Bronx.
Resume
CV available upon request
Contact
melissaacalderon{at}gmail{dot}com