ARTISTS STATEMENT
The themes in my work are inspired by everything around me. My paintings and prints reflect and interpret my emotions, my experiences, and my beliefs. We as humans experience so many things that affect our lives and I try to express this in my pictures. In Sacred Mothers, I wanted to highlight how Mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA is passed down generation to generation from Mother to Child and while boys and girls receive the mother’s DNA only the girls will pass this mtDNA to their children and again only the daughter will be able to pass it down. Autosomal DNA is also used to trace our ancestry, but it includes the entire family tree and can be measured as far back as seven generations while our Mitochondrial DNA can extend all the way back to ancient times. In Sacred Mothers I wanted to pay homage to all the sacred mothers in my own lineage, from the oral histories spoken from my grandmothers and the four generations I can trace back of my own ancestry.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mildred Annani Mercado started painting with an old box of oil pastels that her father was going to throw out when she was 14 years old; she asked if she could have them and couldn’t stop. She is Puerto Rican and was born and raised on the south side of Chicago where she lives with her three children. Annani is a mixed media Artist, Beekeeper, spoken word Poet, and was a Chef for 26 years. After 12 years of misdiagnoses, she was properly diagnosed in 2018 with Fibromyalgia and Crohn’s Disease. She took a step away from her art for more than 10 years. She decided to go back to school and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. During this time, she also began backyard beekeeping and creating art, realizing that like food for the body, she needed art to feed her soul!
Expressing herself through her art, helped Annani deal with her disability, taking her mind off her illnesses and the chaos they have created in her life. She believes in showing her children that there are healthier ways to deal with mental health issues. Inspired by everything around her, her art reflects her experiences, emotions, and beliefs and how she interprets them. The themes in her artwork deal with life, our burdens and how we carry them. She works with acrylics, gouache, oil pastels, Kuretake Japanese Watercolors and has recently fallen in love with the Linocut printmaking process and how distinctively raw each individual print comes out.
© Mildred Annani Mercado