Biography

Pasadena City College - Fine Arts

Since emigrating from her native Manila, Philippines to Los Angeles, California in 1970, Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza has crafted her own visual language of transformation, exalting the everyday in drawings, sculpture, and installation.

Distorting scale, memory, and material significance, she expresses conditions of cultural amnesia and post-assimilation through processes of the handmade.

For nearly 30 years, Mendoza’s work has exhibited in solo and group shows at venues including the Pacific Asia Museum, PlugIn Gallery, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, HudsonJones Gallery, Baik Art, YYZ Artist’s Outlet, and others.

Notable exhibitions featuring Mendoza’s work include A Gathering Place: Artmaking of Asian-Pacific Women Artists in Traditional and Contemporary Directions at the Pacific Asia Museum; the traveling exhibition Memories of Overdevelopment: Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Art (Baerwalt, 1996); and Somewhere in Between at the Kellogg Art Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona.

Mendoza has also found expression through the collaborative curation of group exhibitions including Strands II at the Pinta*Dos Philippine Art Gallery; 600 Images: 60 Artists, 6 Curators, 6 Cities: Bangkok, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Manila, and Saigon at Brewery Art Project; the Drawing Room for the I-5 Gallery; and recently initiating DIFilipinx exhibitions.

Mendoza has received fellowships from the Department of Cultural Affairs (COLA) and Art Matters (NY), and honorariums from the Pacific Asia Museum and Toronto’s PlugIn Gallery.

Mendoza is an Associate Professor and Drawing Coordinator for Visual Arts and Media Studies at Pasadena City College. She earned an MFA from Claremont Graduate University after completing programs at Otis/Parsons and California State University, Los Angeles.