Griselda Rosas

Griselda Rosas 

Griselda Rosas is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working between San Diego and Tijuana. Her practice—spanning textile art, drawing, sculpture, and installation—employs decolonial strategies to examine the visual legacies of colonialism, cultural hybridity, and care/labor across the U.S.–Mexico border. In response to colonial strategies still present in contemporary art—such as cultural appropriation, exoticism, and historical erasure—Rosas reclaims materials, symbols, and techniques rooted in Indigenous knowledge and familial memory, creating works that assert presence, resistance, and care. 

A central focus of Rosas’s work is the shield—a historical symbol of defence that she reimagines through watercolour studies. Drawing from global sources, particularly Mexican shields before colonization, she explores the evolution of shields as objects that hold cultural, political, and metaphors for protection, identity, and resistance in a postcolonial world.

Rosas extends this inquiry through sculptural forms that include coin- toy horses and slingshot-inspired structures—handmade objects that reference the militarisation of childhood, conquest, and colonial spectacle. Horses, historically associated with empire and soldiers, appear in her work as symbolic carriers of power, mythology, and movement across borders. 

Using materials and textiles sourced from the San Diego-Tijuana region, Rosas treats the border not only as a subject, but as a medium—creating a living archive of migration, memory, and intergenerational care. Threading the personal to the political, the historical to the speculative. Working with textiles and embroidery, Rosas draws from intergenerational practices passed through her mother, family and community. Her stitched figures and layered surfaces build a visual language that connects domestic labor with historical revision—placing the acts of sewing, drawing, and storytelling within a larger decolonial framework.

Play and collaboration inform some of her work, - Her son’s  early drawings and current preteen drawings—of monsters, creatures with swords and guns and fantastical animals—sparked an ongoing dialogue in her practice. These shared marks reflect a decolonial reimagining of power and conflict through the lens of childlike invention.

Care is also central to her work and life. As a single parent and artist, the acts of mothering, stitching, and storytelling are deeply intertwined with her creative process. Her series “Yo te cuido” embodies this ethic of care—an intimate, radical maintenance that sustains life amid precarity. The early gestural marks of her son Fernando, woven into her textiles and drawings, reflect collaboration and play. These gestures blur the boundaries between caregiving and art-making, domestic life, and political resistance.

This ethic of care is also shaped by her lived experience at the border, where thousands of Tijuana residents cross daily to perform caregiving labor in San Diego. Rosas’s work acknowledges this complex transborder system of care and labor, situating personal acts of nurturing within broader social and political contexts. Her sewing techniques and practices are part of an intergenerational knowledge passed down through family and community.