Maria Liebana

Maria Liebana is a first-generation Latinx interdisciplinary artist and art educator based in Queens, New York. Liebana’s work is fueled by an increasing globalism and materialism in American culture as well as a search for happiness in a society predicated on these values.

She is obsessed with pop motifs, media in all formats, aesthetics, and excessive consumption, and the seductive promises that these symbols offer. By scrutinizing insatiable consumer practices, she confronts wealth inequality, racial and gender stereotyping, and her own disillusionment with the American dream as a first-generation Latinx artist.

As part of her practice, she collects pop-culture images and thrift-store finds and reassembles them with organic, abstract forms and feminine signifiers - reclaiming these once familiar material goods to form objects with new value and meaning. And through a process of attraction and repulsion, she satisfies her own personal consumerist desires, achieving a sense of empowerment which shapes her identity in a hyperconnected and materialist society.

Liebana holds a BFA in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art. She has exhibited at Departure Studios, Field Projects, Local Project Art Space, Trestle Contemporary Art gallery, Ground Floor Gallery, and Helen Day Art Center. She has partaken in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Vermont and Pickwick Independent Press in Portland, Maine.