Watching Nora Chapa Mendoza paint a six-foot canvas while on the floor leaves one with the distinct impression that Mendoza is not your average 92 year old. And she’s not; the prolific painter, educator, and gallerist just won the 2024 Kresge Eminent Artist Award after decades in the Detroit art world. Through her art, she works to highlight the lives and cultures in Latino and indigenous communities.
Stateside took a trip to Mendoza’s house in West Bloomfield to see her workspace and learn more about her artistic process and what’s brought her to this moment.
Winning this award came as a surprise to Mendoza, who to this day has never applied for a grant.
“I couldn't believe it. I thought someone was playing a trick on me,” Mendoza said.
Moving to Detroit from Texas in the early 1950s, Mendoza noted the lack of Latino presence in the city at the time. And at home, she faced opposition from her then-husband over her selling her work.
“He encouraged me to paint, but not to sell, not to make money. Not because he wanted me to keep them or anything like that, it was just simply because he wanted to be the person who brought the bread home,” Mendoza said.
Despite this resistance, Mendoza pursued art school in the interest of seeing if a more formalized education would bring her different skills than her own self-teaching brought her. She said that “there was no difference there,” and found that her own methods worked best for her.
How exactly did she teach herself to paint?
“By doing,” Mendoza said. “I think maybe because I didn't speak English until I was eight years old, I would draw a lot. And, also, thinking back in time, my mother died when I was four, and it was also a way of replacing that being that didn't exist anymore, but that I needed.”
Mendoza said painting became a form of nurturing herself, and she would paint on anything she could make art out of. In the early days of her career, she often painted women. She recalled being asked why she painted women, to which she replied, “Because I'm a woman, and who would know better than the subject, than a woman.”
In her practice today, she uses her intuition to let her canvases guide her.
“When I work, it's just the paint and the canvas, and I don't think about anything.”
After years of painting, Mendoza started taking on commissioned projects. However, she said she never planned on bolstering herself financially with her art. When she and her former husband split in 1973, the necessity of financial independence was not an abstract question.
“You have to eat. You don't plan on it. I mean, you're born that way. So I was born that way.”
Supporting herself as an artist was truly a solo venture. Mendoza has never applied for a grant, for two main reasons. She said that, on top of knowing how to apply for a grant, she believes that there are always strings attached to money.
“You have to follow some rules, and I was not a rule follower, so it wasn't my thing,” Mendoza said.
Instead of playing by someone else’s rules, Mendoza worked to create new pathways for Latino and other indigenous artists to succeed in the Detroit art scene. As a part of this work, she co-founded Nuestras Artes en Michigan and became involved in numerous community organizations, including the New Detroit Arts Committee, of which she was appointed vice chair, and the Latino Caucus of Southwest Detroit. As an internationally recognized artist, Mendoza also hosted classes and presentations in other countries.
Beyond her work as an artist and active community member, Mendoza opened a gallery called Galeria Mendoza in 1981. In her studio, which she described as being in a state of “disorganized organization,” Mendoza has a series of human-sized wood carvings and other pieces from her time running Galeria Mendoza. Her gallery was the first of its kind in Detroit to specifically feature work by Latino artists.
Mendoza has long understood how to advocate for her work. In the late 1980s, she was introduced to the pioneering labor and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, who went on to commission Mendoza to create paintings in support of his Children of the Fields program.
When Mendoza started to focus more on abstract painting, interpretations of her work expanded. And that’s the way in which Mendoza said she wanted her paintings to be perceived.
“I don't want them to see anything, I want them to see what they want to see,” Mendoza said.
Mendoza never internalized the rules that are impressed on many art students about what her work needed to be or needed not to be — a freedom of thought that she attributed to not attending high school. As Mendoza continues to work today, her abstract paintings remain her favorite.
“I just love what happens when the painting paints itself, and I can just sign it. But you have to have the vision. You have to have the relationship with that paint, and with that canvas, and with your eyes,” Mendoza said.
At 92, Mendoza moves through the world and her work with a fearless confidence.
“What's the point? Fear is a horrible disease,” Mendoza said.
To hear more about Mendoza’s momentous career, listen to the Stateside podcast.
[Get Stateside on your phone: subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify today.]
