Lucía Vidales didn’t intend to be a painter, at least not a traditional one. When she enrolled as an undergraduate at the National Institute of Fine Arts in her native Mexico City, she thought of painting as “conservative,” she says. At the time, the artist, now 37, was working mostly with garbage and other found objects, continuing a practice she had begun as a teenager living in Hong Kong, where she attended an international high school on a scholarship: “I didn’t want to relate my work to canvas or frames.”That changed as she learned more about art history, especially the era of pintura virreinal (“viceregal painting”) that spanned Spanish colonization to Mexican independence. Vidales — who now resides in Monterrey, where she is an instructor at the University of Monterrey — says she became intrigued by the “tensions between Hispanic traditions in terms of technique, iconography and how they understood the world.” She began to wonder how her own work could relate to a cultural canon that, however fascinating, she says, “is so problematic and kind of foreign and violent.”

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Persons: Lucía, ”, “, Vidales —, University of Monterrey — Organizations: National Institute of Fine Arts, University of Monterrey Locations: Mexico City, Hong Kong, Monterrey