Yvette Mayorga (b. 1991, Moline, IL) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work links feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging.
Mayorga holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mayorga’s first East Coast solo museum exhibition, Dreaming of You, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, is on view through March 2024. In 2023, Mayorga had her first major solo museum exhibition, What a Time to be, at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; El Museo del Barrio, The Center for Craft, Asheville, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX; and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Mayorga’s large-scale installation, Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, is on view for the next 25 years for the City of Chicago’s permanent public art collection at O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5.
Her works are in the permanent collections of 21c Museum Hotels, Cerámica Suro, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Recent accolades include the Cerámica Suro Residency (2023), New Mexico Arts Artists Residency at New Mexico Art Museum (2022) and was awarded the Individual Artist Program Grant in Chicago, IL in 2022 among others. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.