Calaya Amparo is a mixed-media artist working primarily in painting, printmaking, and paper sculpture. Calaya creates from memories, photographs she takes, landscapes she has lived in, family stories, dreamed-up futures, or complete improvisation. Her intuitive art practice requires full presence of mind and a constant response to what the work needs. Pushing and pulling forms, adding and subtracting layers, Calaya sometimes creates a work all in one sitting but more often creates in layers accumulated over months. Her works aren’t objects but invitations for the viewers to be present in whatever feelings arise from communing with the works.
Calaya Amparo graduated from Colorado College with a B.A. in Studio Art and now lives in her hometown of Los Angeles. Alongside her personal art practice, Calaya art mentors artists with intellectual disabilities and centers art-making as a place for communal healing, exchange, and play.
