Celeste De Luna: The Printmakers Process

EXHIBITION STATEMENT
I created this body of work as a way of making my process visible and legible. Printmaking is often misunderstood and frequently positioned as secondary within fine art, despite its rich material and conceptual possibilities.As both an artist and educator, I aim to present my practice in a way that is informative, engaging, and accessible to a broader audience.
In the studio, I’ve noticed a recurring curiosity around the wood matrices themselves. These objects, marked by labor and repetition, carry their own visual and tactile language. By bringing together drawings, matrices, misprints, and other fragments of production, I am thinking through the ways these elements can exist beyond their traditional roles.
Rather than treating these materials as incidental, I approach them as sites of potential. This work becomes a means of re-seeing what is often discarded or overlooked, while also pushing my own practice toward greater honesty, experimentation, and authenticity.
This event is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Celeste De Luna is a Tejana artist whose work is rooted in the mysteries of the land, the collective memory, and the stories that move between worlds. Drawing from the Texas-Mexican borderlands, she works primarily in relief printmaking — large-scale woodcuts and reduction prints — alongside fabric installations that honor the labor and beauty of women’s craft. Her imagery navigates the terrain between the natural and the supernatural: migrating bodies, border structures, serpents, water, and deep botanical color. Her prints ask questions about who belongs to the land and who the land belongs to.
De Luna is an assistant professor at Northwest Vista College, San Antonio, where she teaches art appreciation and Mexican American Studies. Her work has been collected by the Blanton Museum of Art, the Alamo Colleges District, and the City of San Antonio, and exhibited internationally in Vancouver, Michoacan, Puerto Rico, and Querétaro. She has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, ArtPlace America, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work appears in the 2025 anthology '¡Somos Tejanas!', published by UT Press, and is currently working on a new body of work.