Meet our artists
Rebecca Lenetsky
Rebecca is a ceramic artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico, exploring the connection between art, emotion, mental health, and healing.
Within a society where mental health is largely disregarded and ignored, she brings awareness to the importance of self-expression. She creates abstract sculptural forms to tap into the unconscious and subconscious mind, exposing her emotions and allowing the clay to guide her when creating her forms.
Being a survivor of trauma. loss, and addiction, she aims to encourage dialogue about personal struggles and the importance of connection and communication to support herself and others to express themselves through art. Her work was recently shown at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in a 2023 pop-up exhibition, Polarity. She has served as Treasurer of the IAIA Ceramics Club. She received a bachelor's in fine arts with an emphasis in ceramics at IAIA in December 2024. Once she has completed her baccalaureate degree, Lenetsky plans to pursue a master's degree in art therapy.
Artist Statement
As a ceramic artist who communicates experiences attuned to the impact of mental health, I expose the internal struggles of living with mental illness and healing as a result of years of trauma, addiction, and depression. Utilizing hand-building and wheel-throwing techniques, I manipulate the form by shaping and distorting the clay, allowing the material to guide me until an organic shape is achieved. I fire my work in a saggar, creating an intimate process where the clay surface is exposed to combustible materials like banana peels and copper carbonate, leaving behind beautiful, chaotic, and unpredictable marks. The alternative firing process of sagar is a metaphor for the chaos and unpredictability of mental illness, addiction, and trauma. In addition, this imparts an organic, natural quality to the pieces. reflecting the challenges and growth people encounter in their healing journey and the continuous pursuit of well-being in the future.
MARI MATHIEU
MARI WAS BORN AND RAISED IN SANTA FE.
SHE SPENT HER CHILDHOOD ON THE BACKROADS OF THE STATE,
ENAMORED BY THE SKY AND THE PLACES WHERE IT MEETS THE
EARTH. DRAWING WITH PEN IS HER FAVORITE MEDIUM. IT HAS
SHOWN HER THE WAYS TO MOVE AND GROW WITH MISTAKES,
TURNING ERRORS INTO SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, FINDING AN
ORGANIC FLOW IN PRECISE LINE WORK, AND ACCEPTING THE
PERMANENCE OF WHAT CANNOT BE CHANGED.
MARI CURRENTLY LIVES IN THE MOUNTAINS NEAR ALBUQUERQUE WITH HER FAMILY. SHE DIVIDES HER TIME BETWEEN RAISING HER DAUGHTER, HIKING TRAILS LOOKING FOR INSPIRATION, AND CAPTURING THE FEELINGS OF AN OPEN NEW MEXICO ROAD.
TO FIND MORE OF HER ART, COMMISSION WORKS, OR TO CONNECT:
INSTAGRAM: @OPHIA.ART
FACEBOOK: OPHIA ART
EMAIL: OPHIAARTNM@GMAIL.COM
Jesus Miguel Avena
Jesus Miguel Avena is a Queer Mestizo painter and ceramicist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work navigates the complexity of identity through the lens of Nepantla—the transformative space of in-betweenness rooted in Chicano thought. Drawing on his lived experience as a Mestizo person born in the United States, Avena uses visual storytelling and object-making to examine the internal and external tensions between Indigeneity, colonial histories, and cultural hybridity.
Through paintings and ceramic works that reference everyday objects, Avena highlights layered histories as products of colonial encounters and cultural survival. By reshaping and reimagining these forms, he seeks to honor Indigenous traditions while also emphasizing the hybrid aesthetics from centuries of adaptation, resilience, and resistance.
His figures, forms, and compositions act as conduits for dialogue—between past and present, sacred and mundane, playful and political. They open poetic spaces where erased or marginalized narratives are made visible, and where cultural memory is activated through both visual and tactile experience. His practice becomes a process of reweaving fragments into a language that is at once personal, collective, and deeply rooted in place.