Clotilde Jiménez Collages Piece Together Family and Lineage
Clotilde Jiménez layers paper and textiles into lush portraits that connect family memory with Black and Puerto Rican identity.
By Art Vault
September 23, 2026 · 2 min read
Clotilde Jiménez builds portraits from paper, fabric, magazine clippings, and other pliable fragments. The Mexico City-based artist layers these materials into dense scenes where personal history and broader cultural archetypes share the same picture plane.
Born in Honolulu to a Puerto Rican mother and African-American father, and raised in Philadelphia before studying in Cleveland and London, Jiménez draws from a life shaped by multiple places. Family members appear beside symbols of Black masculinity, labor, music, food, and spiritual practice, turning collage into a form spacious enough to hold an intentionally complex inheritance.
Pictures Built from Many Histories
The cuts and overlaps remain visible. Patterned cloth, floral paper, photographed bodies, and painted passages meet without being smoothed into a single illusion. That material openness mirrors the identities in the work: assembled, revised, and connected across generations.
Two circular “Flower Portal” works place abundant bouquets against dark grounds. The still lifes echo traditions of floral painting while admitting unexpected faces, fish, keys, and shafts of light, expanding the familiar genre into a personal symbolic vocabulary.
Explore more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
All images courtesy of Clotilde Jiménez and Mariane Ibrahim, shared with permission via Colossal. Source: Colossal.
