Fía Benitez

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

I am a Mexican-born artist based in Los Angeles. I work across painting, drawing, and text, weaving research and personal narrative through the lens of land and labor histories. Discovering a distant relative’s grave in Calvary Cemetery (East Los Angeles) sparked the series of paintings "Myth of Origin". This body of work investigates how the colonial past continues to shape the present—through land ownership, resource extraction, and intergenerational memory. I mined public and personal archives, gathering family photos and images of historical maps, documents, and objects from museum collections which I translated into oil paintings. Together, the paintings function as a conceptual timeline of my paternal family’s trajectory from Europe to the United States to Tabasco, Mexico, and my own eventual move to Los Angeles. Escalera (2026) is part my new series "En otra vida (In Another Life)" through which I attempt to reconstruct a relationship with the maternal grandmother I never met using the archival traces she left behind. Escalera depicts the spiral staircase of a 1968 house in Tecamachalco, Mexico, where my grandmother lived and my mother spent part of her childhood. Rendered in hazy blue-grey tones recalling cyanotypes and architectural blueprints, the staircase becomes both a structure within a family dwelling and an imagined passage between two lives. If home is where memory gathers, this painting creates a provisional place from which I can reach for her.

Artwork