Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and educator, using interdisciplinary projects to build connections between art, science, history and culture. She is founder of MAPSpace, project space in Port Chester, NY, and The Crit Lab, professional critique seminars for artists.

statement

In my work, textile, books, and paper are submerged in natural dyes from oak gall wasp nests, cochineal insects, leaves, flowers, red, green, and yellow clay. Sewn with thread, hair, pearls, bone beads, Milagros, they are hung from ceilings, tied to walls, trees, or one another. Cooking dyes and grinding minerals is an ecofeminist action, these handmade technologies stand against the intersecting oppressions of women and nature in modern industrialization. I craft objects where labor and process is rendered visible, in an act of intimate collaboration, mourning, and resistance.

Imbued with a sense of mourning and desire, love and violence, these objects are lamentations to ongoing violence against women and the land. Humans saturate the world with our grief, our violence, our joy – and the environment echoes back. While grinding a bug or crushing a rock, I experience grief and desire in an intimacy tinged with loss. If nature is fecund, filled with lust, does the plant world also lament? Can a mineral mourn? I collaborate with the material world in an act of furious devotion.

bio

I am a fierce artist advocate and artist-citizen, interested in creating alternate economies for artistic expression through artist-run culture, collaboration, education, and community. I spend a good deal of time working with artists to develop strategies for a lifelong sustainable art practice.

Miranda is founder and director of MAPSpace and The Crit Lab. She has been Visiting Artist at Vermont Studio Center, the Heckscher Museum, and University of Utah; Visiting Lecturer at Purchase College SUNY, Kutztown University, WCC Peekskill Center for Digital Arts; and been awarded residencies at I-Park, Weir Farm, Julio Valdez Printmaking Studio, and Vermont Studio Center. She has received grants from ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts, and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth. Miranda was the first Practitioner-in-Residence at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts of the University of New Haven, where she led the first Lyme study abroad program at the university's campus in Prato, Italy in spring 2017, teaching therer from 2005-2019. She is core faculty at New Hampshire Institute of Art's low-residency MFA program, and teaches curatorial studies in the grad program at Western Colorado University. She served as director and curator of the Gallery at Concordia College-NY from 2008-12. Miranda develops education programs for K-12, museums, and institutions, including Franklin Furnace, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution. She has exhibited at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; the Cape Museum of Fine Art, Cape Cod MA; the Belvedere Museum, Vienna Austria; Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY; and Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY.

patricia miranda

patricia miranda