Biography / Biografía

Elsa María Meléndez

Elsa María Meléndez is a visual artist born in Caguas, Puerto Rico (1974) with 25 years of artistic career. Has exhibited collectively in more than 90 exhibitions in the United States, Uruguay, Cuba, Ireland, Romania, Portugal, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In 2014 she was invited by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña to achieve "Perreta al argumento: 18 años de producción", a mid-career exhibition at the Museo Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina, La Puntilla en San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2019 she received the Flamboyán Artist Fellowship Award in partnership with NALAC. She was nominated for the 2019 USA Fellowship, United States Artists and received the Lexus Fellowship in 2009, among other distinctions. Her work is renowned for incorporating engraving, embroidery, and large accumulations of textiles and synthetic materials. The iconography in the work is nourished by features that define the social and cultural idiosyncrasy of its environment; it summarizes debates between tragedy, comedy, innocence and malice. It uses representations of women to develop an antithesis to behavioral judgments.

Her work is included in the contemporary art collections of the Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; Glendale Community College in California; Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans; Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico; La Casa de Las Américas in Havana; Museo de Arte de Ponce; Ateneo Puertorriqueño; Lolita Rubial Foundation in Minas, Uruguay and in the Museo de Arte de Caguas, among others. After completing the Fine Arts Bachelor degree at the Puerto Rico University, she studied curatorship, registration and collection management at the Smithsonian Center for Education Museum Studies in Washington, D.C. and in SUAGM in Gurabo, Puerto Rico among many others institutions. She has organized and designed more than 50 group exhibitions for the Museo de Arte de Caguas, promoting generational dialogues in exhibitions of a historical nature and in projects that cover social criticism, environmental problems, and gender and race issues.