Yvette Mayorga: Pu$h Thru
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 14, 4-7pm
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Yvette Mayorga: Pu$h Thru, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago renowned for her confection-inspired artworks that intertwine themes of immigration, identity, and feminized labor through a maximalist lens. Utilizing materials like acrylic piping applied with bakery tools—a nod to her mother's labor as a baker—Mayorga crafts opulent, Rococo-influenced pieces dominated by shades of pink to critically examine the American Dream and the Latinx experience, often borrowing compositions from personal and family photos and art history.
Pu$h Thru is Mayorga’s first solo show in Chicago since 2018 and reflects on the last decade of the artist’s life in the city. Showcasing a vibrant fusion of personal narrative, cultural critique, and aesthetic exploration, the works on view weave together a visual diary of protest, neighborhood scenes, and fleeting memories captured on the artist’s phone. Interspersed throughout are images from her family archive—snapshots of the artist as a child celebrating a birthday and sitting in her childhood living room—grounding the exhibition in ancestral history.
Mayorga, who is first generation Mexican American, engages deeply with the aesthetics of Rococo, specifically referencing 17th- and 18th-century painters like Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun. Staged portraits of the artist and her community adopt and remix Eurocentric narratives, offering a Latinx, feminist, and contemporary lens to center overlooked bodies and experiences. Pink, a color that has a long history with Mayorga’s practice, is deployed as a conceptual strategy to destabilize Western ideals of skin tone, evoking questions of race, class, and gendered embodiment while also referencing cosmetic and domestic aesthetics—an ironic and radical reclamation of softness as strength. “Latinxoco,” a term coined by Mayorga, merges Latinx identity with Rococo aesthetics to elevate the Mexican American domestic spaces primarily in the Midwest. Drawing on Rococo’s history of intimate salons and ornate social settings, Mayorga connects this to Diasporic cultural traditions—family celebrations, communal gatherings, and richly adorned homes, reclaiming decorative excess as a form of cultural memory.
Materially, the work is sculptural and immersive. Thick piped paint, “paint skins,” textiles, rhinestones, nail charms, and domestic ephemera sourced from thrift stores are layered to build textured surfaces that blur the line between painting and installation. A custom wallpaper—based on a 1970s pattern from her childhood home—features gilded floral motifs and subtle renderings of the female reproductive system, signaling both beauty and rupture in a moment of heightened political tension surrounding women’s bodies. The exhibition also explores the politics of place, particularly the impact of gentrification on Chicago’s South Side and the erasure of culturally significant spaces. Imagined storefronts serve as speculative interventions—sites where hyperfeminine care practices are re-centered as both joyful and subversive.
These visual constructions explore how gender is performed, how womanhood is politicized, and how Latinx communities, particularly in Chicago, continue to push through structural inequality, environmental crisis, and cultural erasure with humor, care, and defiance. Taken together, Pu$h Thru is a love letter to the last decade while looking ahead; it is a reclamation of space and time, both intimate and collective.
Mayorga’s work will be included the group exhibition Los Encuentros at Ballroom Marfa, TX on view July 4-October 12, 2025, and is working on a large-scale public art project with Times Square Arts for fall of 2025. Mayorga’s public artwork installation Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, (2023) for the City of Chicago’s O’Hare airport Terminal 5, is on view for the next 25 years.
