Maria Yolanda Liebana is a first-generation Latinx artist based in New York City. Her artistic practice is shaped by her liminal ethnic status, underground cultures, and conventional sexist attitudes toward kitsch.
Liebana holds a BFA in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art. She has exhibited at Field Projects, Local Project Art Space, Trestle Contemporary Art Gallery, Ground Floor Gallery, and Helen Day Art Center. She attended Vermont Studio Center and Pickwick Independent Press in Portland, Maine. She is a 2018 and 2020 Queens Council on the Arts New Works Grant Artist recipient. Liebana is currently Kates-Ferri Projects May 2021 Artist in Resident.
Maria Yolanda Liebana's work is fueled by an obsession with celebrity, pop motifs, media in all formats, aesthetics, and excessive consumption, as well as the seductive promises that these symbols offer. Liebana confronts wealth inequality, racial and gender stereotyping, and her own disillusionment with the American dream as a first-generation Latinx artist. As part of her practice, she collects high- and low-end art materials and reassembles them with organic, abstract forms and feminine signifiers - reclaiming these once familiar material goods to form objects with new value and meaning. And through a process of attraction and repulsion, Liebana satisfies her personal consumerist desires, achieving a sense of empowerment, and shaping her identity in a hyperconnected and materialist society.
Follow Artist on Instagram @yolabola