Zamara Cuyún is a self-taught, “Gringindia” artist and educator of de-Indigenized Guatemalan Highland Maya ancestry - born and raised in Minneapolis. She works primarily in acrylics, using elements of Maya history, iconography, and worldview. Themes inspiring her work include histories of colonization and resistance, the persecution and genocide of Indigenous populations, decolonization, cultural resilience, social justice and the central role of women in these processes.
Color and light are of the utmost importance in her work. She wants her subjects – the lovely, as well as the gruesome – to pulse with color, light, and life from within. Vibrant Guatemalan Indigenous Maya textiles and art - contemporary and precolonial - as well as European stained-glass, Scandinavian rosemaling, and contemporary graphic novels inspire and inform her use of color and brushstroke.
Since 2019, Zamara has participated in a number of collaborative public art projects - including the St. Paul City Council Chambers Art Project. In 2022, she was awarded a Forecast Public Arts Early Career Artist Project Grant for “Los Ancestros Wicháhuηkake” at La Mexicana Supermercado in Minneapolis, a mural in collaboration with Thomasina Topbear, Claudia Valentino, COPLA Murals, and countless community members. She also served as a member of the Serpentina Arts leadership committee, an organization fostering the creativity and professional development of Minnesota Latinx visual artists, until 2024. The exhibition, Latina and Latinx MN: Re/claiming Space in Times of Change, recently on view at The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University was her curatorial debut.
IG: @zamara_cuyun_art https://www.instagram.com/zamara_cuyun_art/
“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden… The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient and it is deep.” - Audre Lorde from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches