Ezcurra, María

Ezcurra, María

1973

Maria Ezcurra completed a degree in Visual Art at the National School of Fine Arts (ENAP), UNAM, Mexico City (1992-97) where her tutors included Melanie Smith. In 1994 she was one of a group of artists who founded La Panaderia (The Bakery); an artist-run space, existing from 1994 until 2002, La Panaderia housed exhibitions, performances and discussions and became the venue for a residency exchange programme organised with similar non-profit, non-institutional spaces internationally. Between 1998 and 1999 she completed an MA in Visual Art/Combined Media at Chelsea School of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London, UK and in 1999 she was awarded a Fullbright-Garcia Robles scholarship which allowed her to complete an MFA in Visual Arts/New Genres (1999-2001), at the San Francisco Art Institute, California, USA. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1997 (Foro Cultural Contreras, Mexico City) and her work was shown in three solo exhibitions while she was studying in San Francisco (2001, Introductions 01, Paule Anglim Gallery, Shirts, Diego Rivera Gallery; 2000, Lost and Found, Diego Rivera Gallery). Between 1993 and the present she has regularly participated in collective exhibitions in Mexico and other countries including Puerto Rico, the UK and the USA. An important aspect of her practice continues to take place outside the museum and gallery circuit. Ezcurra's actions in public spaces include Bringing them Back (2000, San Francisco) in which she collected found items of clothing, transformed them into anthropomorphic, stuffed three-dimensional objects and returned them to the places in which they were found.