Melanie Cervantes
The Future is Bright, 2019
Serigraph
30”x22”

Cervantes’s self-portrait is a personal reflection on trauma, healing, survival, and injustice in the artist’s life. Cervantes, a recent lung-cancer survivor, has taken a new focus on healthcare and its disproportionate impact on the lives of people of color in her recent work. The portrait is modeled off of a photograph of the artist moving into her first apartment post-college graduation. The print’s vibrant phosphorous colors reflect her emotional outlook at the time— “a love for life and a new appreciation for one’s own happiness no matter what others thought.” Although self portraiture is a new form in Cervantes’ body of work, she is drawing upon a tremendous legacy of Chicana art that involves self-portraiture as a mode of expression, resistance, and representation.

As the co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaboration formed with her partner and fellow artist Jesus Barraza in 2007, Melanie Cervantes is a prolific Xicana printmaker, artist, and recent lung cancer survivor whose work is intentionally political in capturing and representing community stories of struggle, resistance, and triumph. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Ethnic Studies, Cervantes has gone on to have her work exhibited in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, France, Slovenia, and Mexico at renowned institutions. Her work has also joined the permanent collections of a variety of public and private institutions, including the Library of Congress.