I am an artist drawn to the emotional weight of memory, drawing on personal experience and inherited histories to explore how the past functions as a malleable force that moves through the present and informs the future. My practice investigates the past and the future as temporalities that are always in the process of becoming. I am influenced by the landscape, people, and architecture of my upbringing in rural Guayanilla, Puerto Rico. Marked by the legacy of the sugarcane industry, my family’s history and the land itself drive my inquiry into how place, material, and memory carry unspoken histories.
To engage these histories, I treat materials as conceptual vessels. Working primarily in oil or acrylic on canvas or panel, I create my own pigments from plantain leaves, hibiscus, coffee, soil, and others. Because these elements are physically tied to memory and place, they are archives of the land. This materiality is further layered by bringing together family photographs and Puerto Rican historical archives, treating objects as bridges across time to question how memories honor and give life to those who have passed.
This theoretical framing manifests visually through domestic architectural motifs and color. I recreate from memory elements like tiles, stained glass, and ironwork to interrogate the everyday interiors of my childhood and the layered histories they contain. Within these combined elements, I frequently use the Sankofa symbol, a coded heart-shaped spiral that represents returning to the past to draw lessons to inform the present and future. Reinforcing the ethos of learning from the past to navigate contemporary and future temporalities. Finally, color operates as a central, stabilizing force. Informed by the tropical architecture and saturated environments of my childhood, color is a marker of memory and geography.
Ruiz earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Humanistic Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. Ruiz was an artist in residence at the UCROSS Foundation and Vermont Studio Center, where she was awarded the VSC Fellowship. Her work is in the Fidelity Investments Collection. She has exhibited at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; The Armory Show, New York, NY; Untitled Art Fair, Miami, FL; NYU's Latinx Project, New York, NY; Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY; The Bishop Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Bad Bunny’s La Residencia, San Juan, PR; Galería SURCO, Bayamón, PR; Sabroso! Projects in Santurce, PR, and others. Ruiz was featured in Untitled Edit, Visionary Magazine, Cult Bytes, and New American Paintings.
contact: mariissuun@gmail.com