Ni De Aqui Carpetas
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ABOUT

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Mónica Crystal Ocegueda (She/Her/Ella) is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist from California who works across photography, film, sculpture, and installation, often merging all three to create immersive, narrative-driven environments. Rooted in her upbringing in the Central Valley and her Mexican heritage, Ocegueda’s practice explores identity, belonging, social justice, and the healing of generational and personal trauma. Drawing from family histories, the experiences of farmworker communities, and the voices of Chicana women from the Central Valley. Her work functions as both documentation and resistance; preserving stories that are often overlooked or erased. Through the use of material, image, and space, she creates work that is intimate, yet confrontational. Challenging systems of exclusion while centering cultural memory and lived experience. Her work has been exhibited internationally and throughout California, including venues such as City of Angels Women Film Festival,  Cannes Short Film Festival, Petaluma Arts Center, and Roma Norte in Mexico City. She recently graduated with her MFA from San Francisco State University and will be attending the Casa Lü Sur Artist Residency in Mexico City this summer. She hopes to continue teaching, supporting, and mentoring the next generation of artists.

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For collaborations or questions please contact​​: monicaaa.arte@gmail.com

 

Photos by Daniel Mitchell​

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ARTWORKS FROM THIS INSTALLATION

REFLEJOS

THEY TRIED TO BURY US, BUT THE DID NOT KNOW WE WERE SEEDS 

NI DE AQUÍ, NI DE ALLÁ

TODO LO QUE BRILLA 

FOTOS Y RECUERDOS

SPEAK ENGLISH! 

NO TE OLVIDES...

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No Te Olvides De Tu Cultura is an immersive installation that constists of seven artworks created from family photo archives, inherited objects, and sculptures modeled after my childhood home, a space built to hold memory, to be seen, and to be recognized as a site of healing and safety. Created during a period of deep isolation in San Francisco, this work became a way to return home when I could not physically be there, grounding me in the only thing that sustained me: my family, my culture, and the act of making. The installation parallels my mother’s life and my own, her journey from being born and raised in Mexico to coming to the United States as a wife, a mother, a farmworker, and a cannery worker, and the disorientation she feels when returning to a Mexico that has changed, mirroring my own sense of displacement moving between the Central Valley, Mexico, and San Francisco. We exist in a constant in-between, where belonging is never fixed, and this work lives in that tension. At its core is the quiet, persistent act of creation as survival: my mother’s intricate doilies and my photographs, sculptures, and installations become parallel languages of endurance, care, and expression. By bringing hay and dirt from the Central Valley into the space, filling it with the scent of home and the sounds of Mexican music, I invite the body to remember what the mind tries to hold onto. This work bridges past and present, honoring the labor, sacrifice, and resilience embedded in my family’s history while confronting the generational trauma shaped by discrimination, racism, and sexism. It is an offering, a reclamation, and a declaration that our stories, our labor, and our culture are not only worthy of being preserved, but of taking up space fully, unapologetically, and with love.

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NO TE OLVIDES DE TU CULTURA 

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