bio

Karla Rosas
(she/they/ella/e)
b. 1992, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

Karla Rosas is a visual artist and language justice worker based in New Orleans. Though born in northern Mexico, Karla’s roots are in the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca. Karla migrated to Southeastern Louisiana at the age of eight. Their work challenges conventional depictions of migration by exploring (im)migrant life beyond linear narratives, documentation, and borders. Karla’s art practice began with traditional and digital illustration, and has since expanded into a more tactile approach that merges painting with soft sculpture, embroidery, and assemblage.

Karla’s work is held in collections at the Hood Museum and UC San Diego’s Undocumented Student Center. Their illustrations have appeared in The L.A. Times’ “Latinx Files,” United We Dream's “Immigrant Made” zine, and Antigravity Magazine’s tarot column. They were a 2019 Define American Immigrant Artist Fellow and a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center.

In addition to their art practice, Karla is a language justice worker. They are a former member of the BanchaLenguas Language Justice Collective and Antenna Collective, and a cofounder of Colectiva Manos, a collective of Latine artists in New Orleans.

statement

The materials and techniques I use reflect the lineages and landscapes I come from, both in Southeastern Louisiana and México. My teachers are family, community members, and people who may not call themselves artists, yet make beautiful things from so-called ordinary materials— seamstresses, embroiderers, farmers, basket weavers, carpenters, and altar dressers. My teachers practice in everyday spaces: the kitchen table, the living room, the field, the street.

My art practice began with traditional and digital illustration, and has since expanded into a more tactile approach that merges painting with soft sculpture, embroidery, and assemblage.

Many of my pieces incorporate words or phrases, often in Spanish, in a fragmented manner. The materials and figures in my work are similarly in states of fragmentation or dismemberment. I enjoy creating expressions and figures without an obvious beginning or end, inviting the viewer to make meaning based on their connection to the language(s) represented. For me, this reflects the way memories shift, break apart, and even transform in relation to the world around us. Rather than “remembering” as a linear act, I am interested in the ways we as immigrants “re-member” experiences disrupted by colonization and borders — language, the body, family history, land, labor, art-making, and spiritual transcendence.