As a Mexican American artist, I am informed by my cultural background from both Mexico and the United States, I address social issues that substantiate a voice with an overarching identity of being cast aside. My work bridges the personal to the social, forming a relationship to immigration, gender inequality, labor, and class issues that have resulted in a population that has been left devalued and lost within their own culture. 


Using an altered lace draping technique, I use my garments or items donated by people on either side of the border. I create complex and intimate works that could be considered private in nature. I take garments of individuals through a transformation state using porcelain slip. Drawing from the internal vulnerability carried by each garment, the works act as imprints of past states, and are a culmination of identities, collected and externalized.

Daisy Quezada Ureña (she/her) is multidisciplinary artist, faculty and studio arts department chair at the Institution of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Within her practice she creates ceramic works, installations, and artist’s books that thematically connect to ideas around identity and place in relation to social structures that cross imposed borders.

In 2016, she cofounded Present Cartographers, a collective invested in strategies and perspectives from national and international artists and writers amid a migration crisis and resurgence of territorial claims in local and international border zones. Terreno: Borderland Linguistics and bosque brotante are among their publications.

Quezada Ureña has been exhibited nationally and internationally including : Korean International Ceramic Biennale, Gyeonggi Ceramic Museum (Icheon, South Korea); Indigenous Women: Border Matters, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian and UNM Maxwell Museum of Anthropology; Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place, The Denver Art Museum; Concept: Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (New Taipei Taiwan); Wuhan International Ceramic Exhibition, Hubei Institute of Fine Arts (Wuhan, China).