Mellon Foundation Fellowship Announcement: Rosemary Meza-DesPlas is among the 15 Latinx artists in the 2022 cohort to receive the Latinx Artist Fellowship. Codesigned and managed by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts and cofounded by the Ford Foundation, this first-of-its-kind fellowship recognizes the systemic lack of support, visibility, and patronage of Latinx visual artists. It supports some of the most compelling Latinx visual artists in the U.S. today.

Meza-DesPlas is a multidisciplinary artist who works in drawing, painting, installation, fiber art, performance, and video. She explores sociocultural issues through an intersectional feminist lens. Her artwork, centered upon the human figure, reflects the female experience within a patriarchal society and amplifies women's voices.

The 2022 Fellowship class was chosen to reflect the diversity that exists within the Latinx community, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and non-binary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Chicanx and Ecuadorian-American to Afro-Cuban and Indigenous. The cohort includes artists working in locations such as Baroda, Michigan; Farmington, New Mexico; San Antón, Carolina, Puerto Rico; and Nashville, Tennessee, while the aesthetic practices represented by the fellows span installation art, abstraction, and performance, as well as contemporary craft, textile, and fiber-based work.

Her artwork has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Her work has been written about in several publications, including the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, The Durango Herald, Wall Street International, and Interview Magazine. Ms. Meza-DesPlas parallels the themes in her visual artwork with the written word and spoken word performances.