CJ Chueca

Cecilia Jurado (CJ) Chueca has been a nomadic being her whole life. Her maternal grandfather was an orphan who traveled in a warship and eventually found a putative father in Valparaiso, Chile. He migrated to Perú’s capital city, Lima from a small town called Muquiyauyo-Jauja, located in the high mountains of the Andes. She moved to New York in 2003 after several homes in Lima, Mexico City and Oaxaca. Chueca’s history is the history of perpetual migration, leading her to explore the concepts of home, territory, transition, multiculturality, uprooting and solitude. In some ways she focuses on those lives that are still “on the road” (or without a route) in the streets of the world. Eleanor Heartney writes in her essay: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Chueca creates walls that neither contain nor separate. Instead, they provide insight into the complex ways that walls operate in our lives. In addition to ceramic walls, she has been working on other ceramic objects that depict transition as an ongoing series of airplane windows titled “We are Night and Day.”

On a parallel path, Chueca is mesmerized by the power of water and its never ending ride, its ability to pass through the smallest gaps, its condition as an eternal traveler. We are water, as we are rivers that will eventually mix with other rivers in the deepest water of the ocean.

C.J. Chueca was born in Lima, Perú, and has lived in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and between Lima and New York. Her mediums include hand-built ceramic and mosaic sculptures, walls using ceramic tiles, and paint. The color blue is present in most of her works. She creates installations that many times have songs of longing that depict a situation of transformation related to changing places of living.

Chueca’s 2023 solo exhibition, “Mermaids in the Basement” was shown at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art in New York was curated by Blanca de la Torre, where she is currently an Artist in Residence. In 2022 Chueca had a two-person exhibition at Kates-Ferri Projects, NY and was part of the group exhibition titled “El sonido de las voces que se unden” at CCdeEspaña Tegucigalpa. In 2021, she a had solo show, ¨Micaela, La Sangre de Todas¨, at Vigil Gonzales Galería and participated in “A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience; 20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection”, curated by Amethyst Rey Beaver and Eva Thornton at the Taubman Museum of Art. She was part of “Hay algo incomestible en la garganta” curated by Miguel López at ICPNA-Lima. “XX (6 female Latinx artists working in abstraction)” at LatchKey Gallery in New York; ¨Landmark¨ at KM0.2 in San Juan de Puerto Rico; and Art Souterrain in Montreal with a public commissioned installation curated by Dulce Pinzón at Palais des Congres. She was the July artist resident at Silo6776 with Kates-Ferri Projects in New Hope, Pennsylvania were she presented the solo show ¨Time Traveler¨. In 2020 she presented “The Force of Water” with Latchkey Gallery at the Core Club, NYC. In 2019, she had the solo show “Somos La Noche y El Día” at Vigil Gonzales Galería; and was part of “Crónicas Migrantes, Historias communes entre Perú y Venezuela” curated by Fabiola Arroyo at MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima. In 2018, she had the following solo shows: “I am the river behind the wall” at Mulherin Gallery in Toronto; and “Dos Cielos Azules/Two Blue Skies” at ICPNA (Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano) for which she recently released a monograph in collaboration with Meier Ramirez and VM& Studio. In the upcoming years, Chueca will work in a public commission in the Bronx managed by Percent for Art, from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

A Conversation With Artist CJ Chueca | October 2023 by Jamie Martinez
“I have made a variety of ceramic pieces related to first the people who are traveling and their objects and then ceramics about the travel itself like the ongoing series of ceramic airplane windows. If my ceramic pieces were mostly talking about urban life from their own hard materiality, my paintings were talking about the power of nature through representations of water, rivers, waterfalls, oceans, and skies. LINK

CJ Chueca: Mermaids in the Basement | November 8, 2023 by Blanca de la Torre
“Ceramic tiled walls have been a constant in the work of C.J. Chueca, always paying homage to the dispossessed, marginalized, and excluded. As Eleanor Heartney points out, ‘she loves it for its fragility and stoic endurance and embraces its connection to the troubled lives that it has failed to shelter.'” LINK 

7 Breakout Artists To Watch At Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 | December 6, 2022 by Artnet News
“The airplane windows she creates are not imagined. Per each title all correspond with a flight that the artist was on. She creates her color palette not only from what she saw outside of the window, but also the mood she was in while up in the air.” LINK