Rosemary Meza-DesPlas: A Meandering Line

September 3 - October 9

A Meandering Line is on view in the Lower Traylor Gallery from September 3 through October 10, 2025. Rosemary Meza-DesPlas will give an artist talk on Friday, Sept. 5, at 12:00pm, and will host a drawing workshop on Friday, Sept. 5, at 2:30pm in the Rogers-Traylor Art Building. For more information, visit our Events page.

 

A Meandering Line features meticulously embroidered human hair artworks by Rosemary Meza-DesPlas. Artist Paul Klee once stated, “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” In Meza-DesPlas’ artwork, line is human hair. Line variations in her work suggest emotion, texture, three-dimensionality, and movement. This exhibition showcases experimentations and documents the evolutionary process of working with the first fiber: hair. These artworks reflect material culture, display sewing dexterity, communicate figuration, and manifest themes. Material culture of hair connects medium and meaning: this common fiber correlates to age and beauty. Identity and femininity resonate in Meza-DesPlas’ art. Her hand stitching can be contextualized, art historically, within the 1970s women’s craft movement; however, she is translating drawing techniques into the sewn line. A self-taught stitcher, she has sewn with her natural hair color, dyed hair, and graying hair.

Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, a multidisciplinary Latina/Coahuiltecan artist, incorporates fiber art, drawing, installation, painting, performance art, and video into her studio practice. Through figurative artwork, she amplifies the voices of women and their lived experiences. Socio-cultural issues, gender-based burdens, and political agency are explored through an intersectional feminist lens. The tenacity of her eight aunts in the face of personal tragedies and adversities was an early inspiration; their narratives contributed to her embrace of feminist ideology. Thematic continuity links Meza-DesPlas’ visual artwork with her academic writing and poetry. This written discourse provides a foundation for her performance artwork. In 2022, she was honored with a Latinx Artist Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, she was awarded a grant in 2022 to create and stage a new performance artwork. Her work has been exhibited at many museums, including the Museum of Sonoma County, Spartanburg Art Museum, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Koehline Museum of Art, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas. Meza-DesPlas received a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.