About the Artist
![]()
Photo by: Lydia Daniller.
Bio:
Julieta Beltrán Lazo is a visual artist and educator working between Guadalajara, Mexico, and Chicago, USA. She received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the Rhode Island School of Design (2020). Beltran is currently the Painting and Drawing Teaching Fellow at SAIC (2025-26). She was the recipient of the Higher Education Scholarship from the Jumex Art Foundation (2023-25). Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Peru, Rome, Berlin, and the United States.
Artist Statement:
My artistic practice approaches the body as a site of inquiry: a porous psychological terrain shaped by memory, sensation, and lived experience. I begin from the premise that the body and its perception are not neutral; a body is read, classified, and regulated. For this reason, I work with my own body as both material and point of departure.
My practice operates primarily within a pictorial plane and engages with other practices as sites of research. Beyond autobiography and representation, I seek to activate tensions that make visible the conditions of legibility that pass through the body—what is permitted, contained, or repressed. My work is sustained by the friction between the organic—what pulses, sweats, scars, weighs, and grows—and the social and cultural regimes that determine how a body is interpreted and inhabited.
Two questions structure my inquiry: what does it mean to understand the body as a constant becoming, something that never fully settles into a fixed form? And how might this condition interrupt the precariousness of the domesticated body? From these questions unfolds a material exploration that moves fluidly between fibers, painting, writing, and movement, allowing materials to guide and redirect the process, even when they contradict it.
In the studio, I work from zones of friction—desire and discomfort, intimacy and public resistance, containment and release—to sharpen the nuances of self-perception. In my work, the body appears bounded or transformed into structure or shelter, layered skins and collapsing figures. Insisting on its mutability and incompleteness: a site that remembers, resists, and continually remakes itself through material, gesture, time, and care.
Julieta Beltrán Lazo is a visual artist and educator working between Guadalajara, Mexico, and Chicago, USA. She received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the Rhode Island School of Design (2020). Beltran is currently the Painting and Drawing Teaching Fellow at SAIC (2025-26). She was the recipient of the Higher Education Scholarship from the Jumex Art Foundation (2023-25). Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Peru, Rome, Berlin, and the United States.
Artist Statement:
My artistic practice approaches the body as a site of inquiry: a porous psychological terrain shaped by memory, sensation, and lived experience. I begin from the premise that the body and its perception are not neutral; a body is read, classified, and regulated. For this reason, I work with my own body as both material and point of departure.
My practice operates primarily within a pictorial plane and engages with other practices as sites of research. Beyond autobiography and representation, I seek to activate tensions that make visible the conditions of legibility that pass through the body—what is permitted, contained, or repressed. My work is sustained by the friction between the organic—what pulses, sweats, scars, weighs, and grows—and the social and cultural regimes that determine how a body is interpreted and inhabited.
Two questions structure my inquiry: what does it mean to understand the body as a constant becoming, something that never fully settles into a fixed form? And how might this condition interrupt the precariousness of the domesticated body? From these questions unfolds a material exploration that moves fluidly between fibers, painting, writing, and movement, allowing materials to guide and redirect the process, even when they contradict it.
In the studio, I work from zones of friction—desire and discomfort, intimacy and public resistance, containment and release—to sharpen the nuances of self-perception. In my work, the body appears bounded or transformed into structure or shelter, layered skins and collapsing figures. Insisting on its mutability and incompleteness: a site that remembers, resists, and continually remakes itself through material, gesture, time, and care.