Maria de Los Angeles joins Yale School of Art faculty

Muralist Maria de Los Angeles, formerly of Santa Rosa, will join the faculty of the Yale School of Art at the end of August, where she will be assistant director of the painting and printmaking programs.

“The Yale School of Art is a very famous program,” de Los Angeles said. “I am excited to be teaching printmaking, painting and drawing there.”

The artist holds a master of fine arts degree from the school, which is located in New Haven, Connecticut. She and her husband, photographer and multimedia artist Ryan Bonilla, live in Jersey City, New Jersey, where she maintains a studio at the Mana Contemporary art center.

Since she left the North Bay, de Los Angeles, who turned 34 on Tuesday, has maintained her ties with Sonoma County, where she grew up. She has painted murals installed in Glen Ellen and at Sutter Hospital in Santa Rosa.

For the Glen Ellen mural, on a mixed-use building that includes the Garden Court Cafe restaurant at 13647 Arnold Drive, the artist drew on Glen Ellen’s history and landscape, noteworthy people and suggestions from the community to create her brilliantly colored work. In past work, de Los Angeles has focused on themes of migration, displacement and identity.

Her latest local project is a mural at the new Santa Rosa Junior College Foundation building depicting the history of the school and community. The mural is scheduled for installation in January, with a public unveiling ceremony expected in March.

“Maria’s mural is going to be in our community room, where we will have boarding meetings, community and alumni events and lectures,” said J Mullineaux, executive director of the Santa Rosa Junior College Foundation.

“At the foundation, we raise money for the college, scholarships and student needs,” he added. “We wanted to commission work from alumni for the new building, and we wanted to share Maria’s story.”

The Museum of Sonoma County in downtown Santa Rosa presented a one-person show of work by de Los Angeles in 2019, including 10 paintings, three sculptures and an installation displaying more than 300 drawings, as well as dresses made by the artist.

Born in Mexico, de Los Angeles crossed the border to California with her family in 1999 when she was 11. The family settled in the Roseland neighborhood of Santa Rosa, which was then still an unincorporated part of Sonoma County.

She attended Lawrence Cook Middle School and Elsie Allen High School before graduating from Santa Rosa High and going on to Santa Rosa Junior College.

She went on to earn a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from Pratt Institute in New York in 2013 and a master of fine arts degree in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2015.

She has previously worked part-time on the faculties of Pratt Institute, Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and Southern Oregon University in Ashland.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.