Bio
Melissa Godoy Nieto was born in Tijuana and grew up in Culiacán Sinaloa, Mexico. She is an artist working in textiles, drawing, installation, and performance.
Melissa has exhibited and performed, at Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Black Mountain College Museum ReViewing in Asheville NC, BAM Gala, Lilac Preservation Project in NYC, Material Art Fair Mexico City, NN Galeria Oaxaca City, Spring/Break Art Show NYC and LA, Salon Acme Mexico City, Winston-Salem University NC, BRIC House Brooklyn, The NARS Foundation Brooklyn NY, MARCO Museum of Contemporary Art Monterrey Mexico, Pictoplasma Germany, and Musée Régional d’art Contemporain Sérignan.
Her exhibition "Waters Change, Colors Fade" was featured in Atmos Magazine during Climate Week NYC 2021. Her largest textile work to date is currently on a world tour with the NYC-band Blonde Redhead.
In addition to her art practice, Godoy Nieto works as a Spanish-English translator and interpreter and is the archivist for photographer Thomas Hoepker.
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Statement
I work across textiles, drawing, installation, and performance through open-ended series that weave together real, imagined, and subconscious landscapes. My practice investigates the interplay between human experience and the environment, moving between cultural identity, belonging, and the underworlds of water, soil, memory, and resilience.
My projects are informed by research in ecological, cultural, and mythological subjects. This research extends into material exploration, where I work with both art media and natural materials. Ink, pastels, wax, sand, salt, pigments like indigo and cochineal from Oaxaca, soil and water gathered in different locations, citrus, charcoal from burnt olive trees. In my textile collages and installations I collect and repurpose fabric, creating layered surfaces that hold both personal and collective histories.
I am interested in interdependence, traditional ecological knowledge, oral histories, and rituals that move between the everyday and the sacred. By combining abstraction and representation, my imagery becomes a site for reflecting on the political, social, and ecological entanglements that shape our worlds.
Photo: Raquel Duron
Email inquiries to melissa.godoy.nieto@gmail.com
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