About

Yanely Rivas Maldonado is a working-class printmaker, cultural worker, and visual storyteller with ancestral roots amongst the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico —lands traditionally steward by the Purépecha. They come from a lineage of campesinos, merchants, and an abuela who was a partera (birth worker) in her village.

Her art practice has been sowed in community and has flourished in the versatile soil of social justice movements and the solidarity efforts she’s been a part of over the last decade. Their art is an offering and prayer for a world where we are all beautifully free and interconnected —living in good relationship with the lands, waters, and beings that so graciously nourish our hearts. They create artwork to weave us across the continuum of past-present-future and to leave seeds of ancestral memory, resistance, joy, and hope along the path back to center —back to home.

Yanely is inspired by so many creative mediums ranging from basket weaving, printmaking, digital illustration, watercolor, and protest art that lives in the hands of community. She is finding happiness in the ability to collectively tend to Mother Earth and promote the preservation of Indigenous lifeways, culture, and our overall well-being through traditional arts programming at the Anahuac Farm of the CAPACES Leadership Institute.