New Acquisition: Crystal Bridges Welcomes Maria de Los Angeles’s Citizen Dress into the Collection

In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, we at Crystal Bridges are excited to announce the acquisition of a new artwork, Citizen Dress, by New Jersey-based artist Maria de Los Angeles. The garment previously appeared in our 2022 exhibition, We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy. Along with the dress, the museum also acquired four drawings by the artist.

Maria de Los Angeles’s Citizen Dress is a three-dimensional, hand-stitched construction of paintings, sculpture, drawings, quilting, and collage that fuses the artist’s various art practices into a single garment.

Using the United States flag, recycled textiles, canvas, found patches, and other objects, Maria de Los Angeles decorates the varying surfaces with recurring symbols throughout her work.

Roses, for example, bloom across the dress and symbolize both love and passion for the artist, but also blood and struggles that in many ways define the relationship between Mexico, her home nation, and the United States, her adopted one.

Skeleton figures appear through the garment, representing migrating families and the sugar skulls standing in for ancestors prominent in Dia De Los Muertos altars. The pieced-together US flag, interspersed with materials like rainbow flags, patches, T-shirts, and jeans, metaphorically reflects the construction of a nation, its citizenry, and how shared and conflicting ideals bind them.

While Maria de Los Angeles regularly creates garments such as Citizen Dress, she does not identify them as “fashion.” Instead, she describes them as part of a lineage of pattern and decoration present in the feminist movement, activism, and performance. With Citizen Dress, the artist explores stories of migration from Mexico to the US, also centered on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the so-called “Dreamers”) experiences.

The loose brushwork of the work’s paintings and drawings reflects Maria de Los Angeles’s freehand drawing style. She draws from memory rather than reference images, amplifying the resonant themes of imagining a nation, its peoples, and their ideals.

Maria de Los Angeles (she/her/hers) was born in Michoacán, Mexico (1988) and is now based in Jersey City, New Jersey, working as a critic and Assistant Director of the Painting and Printmaking Program at the Yale School of Art. She received her BFA in painting from Pratt Institute (2013) and her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art (2015).

She works in drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and performance to reflect on border crossing, citizenship, displacement, family, identity, migration, nationality, and policing.

Want to learn more about the artist and this work? Read more about Maria de Los Angeles and  Citizen Dress  in Harpar’s BAZAAR.