Aida Lizalde

Aida Lizalde is a Mexican-born, California-raised artist and educator whose practice explores relationships between place, memory, and material. Working primarily with clay, she moves between the landscapes of Mexico, California, and Virginia, often gathering and transforming local earth into sculptures that carry traces of their places of origin and their layered histories.

Her work considers the ethics of nomadism and the effects of diaspora through material speculation and sculptures that become companions, guardians, vessels, temporary shelters, and ritual artifacts. Her sculptures are shaped by the body’s desire to belong to a place while remaining in motion, and by an attempt to understand its relationship to landscape and the nuances between the natural and artificial. Through clay, weaving, burial, firing, weathering, and fermenting, Lizalde explores how materials can hold, transform, and transmit experiences of place.

Lizalde teaches ceramics at WashU. She earned her Masters of Fine Art in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University and her Bachelor or Art in studio art with a minor in art history from the University of California, Davis.

Lizalde has been a recipient of various awards including the Future Funds, Dedalus MFA Fellowship, and the William and Dorothy Yeck Award. Her work has been exhibited widely with most recent solo exhibitions at Visible Records, Hiestand Galleries, and group exhibitions at the Toggler Art Museum, Personal Space Gallery, and Compound Gallery Yucca Valley, among others.