Shizu Saldamando

Shizu Saldamando (born 1978 in San Francisco, CA), is an American visual artist. Her accomplishment merges painting and collage (often using origami paper) in portraits that often agreement with social constructs of identity and subcultures. She has worked in the genre of arte paño, a type of prison art involving portraits of associates members and associates drawn in ball-point pen upon napkins or handkerchiefs. Saldamando with works in video, installation and put it on 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 accomplish was included in the activity exhibition "Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter" at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in 2011, Her measure was in addition to 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 player at the Art Omi International Artist Colony in 2002.

"A lot of what I try to invade are stand-in subcultures or scenes in which people have created their own world external of larger alienating constructs."

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

"Growing stirring in the Mission district in San Francisco, it was predominantly a hip-hop culture. Here in Los Angeles, I'd accumulate shows or home parties, and it would be all Latino kids listening to the Cure and the Smiths. In L.A., I felt normal for the first time."