Artist Maria de Los Angeles expresses her life through her art

With an Ivy League education and a heart full of gratitude for the community that supported her early efforts, artist Maria de Los Angeles was back in Santa Rosa this summer. She was paying it forward, encouraging underserved children to expand their world through art.

De Los Angeles, 27, knows what it’s like to overcome obstacles and find joy through self-expression on paper and canvas. The resilient Roseland native sometimes lets adversity influence her work, but she hasn’t let it interfere with her aspirations.

The Yale-educated artist has paintings in private collections and was commissioned to paint her first mural at the new Rohnert Park Health Center, but she made headlines in the New York Times for overcoming a crushing setback.

Hundreds of paintings, drawings and hard-earned arts supplies were lost in a campus fire at Pratt Institute just weeks before her thesis presentation and her graduate school interview at Yale, works that were necessary for both.

“To get an interview to Yale is a big deal,” she said. “You have to do your best because you may not get another chance. That’s how hard it is.

“I lost everything, all the work I prepared for my thesis and for the interview at Yale.”

De Los Angeles pushed through and completed a new body of work that helped her graduate in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Pratt in Brooklyn, and earned her a highly competitive spot in Yale’s art program.

“My work was dramatic and dark and there was a lot of anger in it, I’m sure,” she said. “Your work is always reflecting your mental state and what you’ve been through.”

Her own journey as an artist is monumental by any account. De Los Angeles never had even a coloring book or crayons as a young girl. Her sketches were done on lined paper with a lead pencil, scenes of horses, flowers and plants inspired by the farm where she lived in Tabasco, Mexico.

As a child who milked cows in the wee morning hours and sold her mother’s homemade cheese from a bicycle, she had no idea that people could become artists.

“I didn’t really see art except for religious art,” de Los Angeles said.

She still recalls the impact of discovering art for the first time at 9, when she was transformed by the colossal sculpted stone heads of the ancient Olmec civilization on display around her hometown on the Gulf of Mexico.

“It’s never gone away from my mind, the experience of seeing something created by someone’s hands,” de Los Angeles said.

She wasn’t exposed to colored pencils, paints, brushes, sketch pads or canvas until she immigrated to Santa Rosa at age 11. She started seventh grade at Lawrence Cook Middle School with a second-grade education and no English-language skills.

With determination and the help of a compassionate teacher, de Los Angeles became literate in both English and Spanish within a year. She also discovered an insatiable desire to create art.

She grew up “in all the toughest neighborhoods” in Roseland, attending Elsie Allen High School before hearing about ArtQuest and transferring to Santa Rosa High School for her senior year.

After becoming the first in her family to graduate high school, de Los Angeles paid her way through four years of Santa Rosa Junior College by working at a fast-food eatery on Stony Point Road.

She had little support from her working-class parents, who were unfamiliar with higher education and the opportunities it could provide. She was expected to earn money and help the family, split by divorce by the time de Los Angeles headed off to college.

She recalls winning an art contest sponsored by the Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County when she was still living in Santa Rosa. Proud of her accomplishment, she embraced “the power to transform a piece of paper into something beautiful.”

That realization helped de Los Angeles pursue her dreams of becoming a professional artist.

She struggled with her family’s expectations but knew her future depended on education. She credits several art teachers with recognizing her talent and ambition and encouraging her to follow her passion.

After de Los Angeles earned her associate of arts degree from SRJC, she applied to 11 top art colleges across the country and was accepted by nine. As an undocumented citizen, she couldn’t qualify for student loans or scholarships, a realization that was nearly crushing.

“One of my dreams was impossible,” she said. “I called every school and asked if there was anything you can do.”

She was admitted to the small but prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn as an international student and offered $20,000 toward tuition if she could match the amount. De Los Angeles spent an hour on the phone with Pratt officials assuring them she would meet the challenge.

That summer she painted nonstop and sold “more than a few hundred” works at six exhibitions around Santa Rosa, earning $25,000 and her college admission.

“People showed up and bought my work, and I was able to go to New York,” de Los Angeles said. “You know, it was a big deal that they were there for me and that I could go to university.”

She funded her education by selling artwork and working at various part-time jobs, including waiting tables at a Moroccan restaurant.

“I needed to make it through every week,” she said. “I just couldn’t go to New York (City) any time I wanted to. It wasn’t in my budget.”

Instead of joining friends to visit pricier NYC museums and galleries, she headed to campus exhibits and libraries where artwork also was exquisite. She was especially happy to find works by Latino artists.

“I got to see art from my own country,” de Los Angeles said. “I had not even seen that when I was in Mexico.”

She graduated with an MFA from Yale in May and received Yale’s Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, a $10,000 award presented to a promising artist. This semester, she begins work as an adjunct art professor teaching color theory at Pratt.

Today, de Los Angeles’ artwork is brighter but still conveys the social messages of earlier works, often with themes of immigration, racism or sexism. She paints in oils and acrylics, sketches almost daily and also works in wood block and etching.

“I love playing with color and shape and coming up with my own way to represent things,” she said.

Her work depicts people, figures, symbols and flowers inspired by the tablecloths her mother embroiders, some of them abstracts.

“I used to paint very dark. Now, I have lots of color in my work,” she said. “You can have beauty and still tell stories about how our society has unfairness.”

Many of de Los Angeles’ pieces incorporate “thought bubbles” and multiple images to help tell stories. In one, a servant appears much smaller than the diners seated for a meal, her thoughts painted overhead. Select spaces of white are used for emphasis and motion.

“It’s showing more about a person, more of a social commentary,” de Los Angeles said.

Sometimes figures appear to be floating, “kind of like how I feel about being undocumented,” the artist said. “Lots of it is inspired by my life.”

Pedro Toledo, chief administrative officer with the Petaluma Health Center that administers the new clinic in Rohnert Park, said de Los Angeles was commissioned for a mural in the main entrance to inspire patients who also are seeking equality and opportunity to overcome their barriers.

“Maria shows us that following your passion and refusing to give up pays dividends,” Toledo said.

The colorful, three-panel mural has a vibrant harvest theme, painted particularly for children.

“Her work often depicts images about the immigrant experience,” Toledo said. “They illustrate the pain of living in the margins, the hope for opportunity, the struggles for equality.”

The artist spent the past two summers in Santa Rosa, giving back to the community that helped launch her career.

Last summer she returned home to the controversy and pain surrounding the killing of 13-year-old Andy Lopez by a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy, something that impacted her seven younger siblings and her broader circle of friends and acquaintances.

“I had a feeling of despair in my heart about the feeling of our community. I decided I couldn’t live with myself for doing nothing,” de Los Angeles said. “All I knew to do was art. I didn’t know how to be an activist, and there (already) was lots of activism going on.”

She founded the One City Arts program for low-income children in Sonoma County, a free, two-week arts camp with professional artists as instructors, quality supplies and an opportunity for self-expression.

Fifty youth aged 6 to 17 attended the camp this summer and last. Initially funded through community and corporate donations de Los Angeles solicited, the camp now operates through the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts’ Education Through the Arts program.

De Los Angeles is grateful to the center and its ongoing commitment to One City Arts. She is hopeful the program will inspire budding artists to recognize their potential.

She values the opportunities made available to her through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an immigration policy established by the Obama administration that made it possible for her to hold a teaching assistant position at Yale, to establish One City Arts and to earn a driver’s license (at age 25) so she could coordinate the program.

“Painting makes me really happy and so does teaching children,” she said.

Her next ambition is to earn a doctorate in Mesoamerican art history and possibly apply for a fellowship in Europe.

De Los Angeles will always work as a fine artist, she said, but after witnessing the joy and progress of students at One City Arts, she now hopes to become an art teacher as well. Her one-year post at Pratt is just the beginning.

“I didn’t want to come to this country. I argued the whole way here with my parents,” she said. “Now I feel very blessed I’ve been allowed to do this amount of education I have. When I look back, coming here was a huge opportunity I didn’t comprehend.”