Luisa Pastor participates at “Paper Routes,” the sixth installment in “NMWA’s Women to Watch” exhibition series that showcases contemporary artists working in paper.

The exhibition series is presented every two to three years and is a dynamic collaboration between the museum and participating outreach committees. The 22 committees participating in this exhibition worked with curators in their respective regions to create shortlists of artists working with paper. From this list, NMWA curators selected the artists whose work is on view in Paper Routes.

Featured artists in Paper Routes respond to the many uses and cultural associations of paper —from protest signs to packaging, lottery tickets, and wallpaper— approaching the medium in varied ways. Some highlight the delicate properties of paper through meticulous cuts, resulting in elaborate forms, patterns, and designs. Others compact and consolidate the material, forming surprisingly dense and monumental sculptures. Artists rely on traditional as well as innovative techniques. Paper Routes highlights and celebrates this diversity of approaches and the transformation of this ubiquitous and eclectic material into complex works of art.

Mixed-media artist Luisa Pastor frequently brings together fragments of old accounting books, journals, and other common objects to deconstruct long-held societal values and ideas while creating new meanings. She is particularly drawn to papers found in flea markets or antiques stores exploring the traces of time imprinted on paper. For her El azar del mestizaje series, which will be featured in Paper Routes, she reflects on histories of miscegenation by interweaving different colored lottery tickets into new compositions, subverting the concept of racial hierarchies through random mixing.

Pastor received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Granada University in Spain (1997). She has a PhD in Fine Arts from Miguel Hernández University in Alicante, Spain (2016) and a graduate degree in Photography from GYM de Arte y Cultura in Mexico City (2016–17). She has been awarded various fellowships, scholarships, and grants including a Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the Institute of Aesthetic Research in 2018 and an Artistic Creation Stays Excellence Scholarship in Special Programs of the Mexican Government (SRE/AMEXCID) in 2015–16. She has exhibited widely in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Mexico.