Samantha Mendoza

Samantha Mendoza was born in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California. Her journey into printmaking began at College of the Sequoias in 2010, under friend and mentor Richard Peterson. She graduated with her BFA in Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015, followed by her M.F.A. at Northern Illinois University in 2019. With influences such as Dark Romanticism and Magic Realism, the work emphasizes an ornamental aesthetic that fixates on storytelling crafted from rumination and aspiration.

Samantha is a member of Grafik House, a collective print shop based in downtown Saint Louis, and teaches printmaking and drawing at Webster University.

My practice aims to merge the sacred tradition of storytelling with the ritualistic process of printmaking. With a heavy emphasis on symbolism, these works weave the intimacy of self-inquiry with patterns of collective thought and experience. Narratives are constructed with references to hybridized time periods, mythologies, rituals, and environments which place figures somewhere in the gap between the mundane and the mystical. My inspiration is deeply rooted to the history of Women, with concepts alternatively conforming to or subverting archetypes. Introspective investigations flirt with ideas of love and loss, mental health, and human fallibility. I often incorporate the use of the figure to serve as protagonist or anti-hero, as they shuffle back and forth between the suffocation of guilt and the burgeoning promise of hope and self-empowerment.

Artwork from Motley Multiples is now available to collect below. Read the press release here.