Graciela Núñez Bedoya

 

b. 1987 Lima, Peru

 

Lives and works in Atlanta

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BFA, Georgia State University, 2015.

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Graciela is the younger of two children born to William H. Núñez Carrillo and Maria L. Bedoya Revollar. She grew up in the coastal suburb city of Callao. From an early age, Graciela observed her father do small drawings and paintings which inspired her to pursue art; the family moved to Atlanta in 2000 to make a fresh start. Graciela became fascinated with classical instruction and traditional studio practice honed by the old masters of the Renaissance. She became dreadfully aware of the limitations of her immigration status while applying to college during her senior year in High School which pushed her and her brother into the restaurant industry where she met so many others under the same circumstances. She was naturalized as a U.S citizen in the summer of 2014 while pursuing her BFA in painting, drawing, and printmaking from Georgia State University. Her work has exhibited in Alabama, New Mexico, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She currently resides in Lilburn where she has a small studio space and is developing a new direction for her work that reflects on her indigenous Quechua roots; she continues to center around realism and the figure as her main subject.

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       “Time waits for no one. I never fully understood how my residency status affected me until my last year in High School; navigating the American immigration system was akin to Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, no matter how close I’d get to the top new obstacles would bring the heavy mass down and all the hard work along with it. It was suffocating not knowing if, when, or what it would take to move forward. I ran the clock so recklessly pursuing the mirage of the American dream that I did not comprehend I was drinking sand; time became a precious commodity I could only gain back by purposely turning it into meaningful, fully fleshed two-dimensional figures inhabiting timeless dreamscapes. Time is indispensable and the meter by which all things are now measured."