Shizu Saldamando

Shizu Saldamando (born 1978 in San Francisco, CA), is an American visual artist. Her conduct yourself merges painting and collage (often using origami paper) in portraits that often deal with social constructs of identity and subcultures. She has worked in the genre of arte paño, a type of prison art involving portraits of relations members and links drawn in ball-point pen on napkins or handkerchiefs. Saldamando along with works in video, installation and exploit art.

Saldamando was born in 1978 to parents of Mexican-American and Japanese-American descent. She was raised in the Mission District of San Francisco. She attended the California Institute of Arts and the University of California, Los Angeles School of Arts and Architecture.

Her behave was included in the organization exhibition "Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter" at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in 2011, Her pretense was furthermore shown in "We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles," curated by Elizabeta Betinski as an qualified collateral exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale. She was a resident artist at the Art Omi International Artist Colony in 2002.

"A lot of what I try to occupy are exchange subcultures or scenes in which people have created their own world uncovered of larger alienating constructs."

"My friends and I would purchase Teen Angels, a magazine of lowrider and cholo art, and attempt to copy the drawings of Aztec pyramids and warriors and naked girls. I think that's how I got good at ballpoint pen renderings."

"Growing taking place in the Mission district in San Francisco, it was predominantly a hip-hop culture. Here in Los Angeles, I'd build up shows or house parties, and it would be anything Latino kids listening to the Cure and the Smiths. In L.A., I felt usual for the first time."