Leticia Pardo is an artist and architect from Mexico City, based in Chicago. Her work, largely influenced by her background in architecture, reflects on the ways in which place making, migration and political borders manifest in the built environment. Through the lens of place making, which Pardo defines as the way in which an individual or a group of people employ tangible or intangible resources to build a sense of belonging at a specific place, her work ponders on the personal and political layers interwoven within the architectures that shape us socially––from the domestic space to the public realm. Documentation is often a point of departure in Pardo’s work. Recurring to seriality and indexicality, she employs different media such as casting, architectural drawing, photography and printmaking to construct sculptures and installations that respond to specific sites. In her past work, Pardo has captured the visual, architectural and aesthetic codes of neighborhoods in which Mexican immigrants have established in Chicago. During trips to the US/Mexico border, she has also made records and captured impressions of the presence of an imposed physical boundary that results in the surge of different ways of adaptability around it, but most importantly an undeniable social and political impact on all of us, regardless of how near or distant we are from it. Her work has been shown at the Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City, the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, SITE Galleries, Hyde Park Art Center, among others. She has attended residencies such as Art Omi in NY, Pocoapoco in Oaxaca and KinoSaito in NY. Leticia is currently an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington.

Image: Leticia Pardo, migajas (32.53384° N, 117.12311° W), 2024. Embossments and imprinted rust from fragments of the US/Mexico border wall that fell upon the crossing of two men, on legal-size paper. Each print 14" x 8.5"

Headshot: José de Sancristóbal