SUEEY GUTIÉRREZ

Lives and works in Patchogue, NY

Artist statement

My figurative paintings and mixed media drawings are an act of resistance and reclamation. As a first-generation Salvadoran American of Maya and Nawa descent, I paint to recover narratives that history has tried to erase and center Indigenous women as guides, guardians, and sources of ancestral wisdom. I uplift feminine embodied knowledge while also grieving the cost of dismissing feminine intuitive warnings. Through gold leaf, sacred natural elements, and repossessed Catholic iconography, I build a visual language that honors ancestral memory and reclaims narrative power for Indigenous and diasporic women. Across this body of work, I return to the vessels through which inheritance travels: the body, water, land, and labor. Feet pressed into soil become both anchor and threshold, lifting toward ascension while carrying the weight of endurance, surrounded by native blossoms, migratory butterflies that speak to movement and continuity across generations, and animals that symbolize transformation. The hands of the migrant farmworker, whose labor sustains daily life, yet remains largely unseen. I depict coffee beans, El Salvador's "golden" export crop, shaped by colonial extraction and forced migration, some rendered in gold leaf to symbolize stolen wealth and the laborers' claim to justice. Water, fire, and earth transform personal grief into renewal, honoring the legacies of those who came before me. I paint toward the divine feminine, the moon goddess, midwife, and weaver...

Artwork