Ana María Herrera is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work blends assemblage, sculpture, and photography to create surreal compositions rooted in memory, symbolism, and transformation. Drawing from the emotional landscape of life along the U.S.–Mexico border, her pieces investigate themes of identity, displacement, and unseen histories through an otherworldly lens. Her practice is defined by the intuitive combination of found materials—weathered wood, rusted metal, glass, textiles, and forgotten objects—often assembled into suspended forms or dreamlike arrangements that seem to exist between states of reality. By recontextualizing these remnants of time and use, Herrera invites viewers into layered spaces where contradiction and metaphor coexist, and where the physical and the psychological are entangled. Influenced by both the surrealist tradition and the rich visual culture of the border region, Herrera’s works are poetic and introspective. Her compositions reflect on what is discarded or silenced, transforming everyday fragments into portals of meaning. Figures are often absent, yet their presence is felt through traces—objects carrying the weight of stories untold. Herrera’s recent solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Art Center in San Diego featured assemblages that embodied this surreal sensibility, combining tactile elements with conceptual depth. Her work not only reflects personal and cultural memory but also challenges the viewer to question what is hidden, distorted, or transformed in the act of perception. In addition to her studio practice, she is actively engaged in community-based art across the San Diego–Tijuana region, often collaborating with youth and local neighborhoods to explore identity through creative expression. Ana María Herrera’s art offers an invitation into the in-between: a place of surreal clarity where the material becomes myth, and silence speaks.
My work is a conversation between memory, material, and transformation. I create assemblages and mixed media pieces using found objects—weathered wood, rusted metal, glass, textiles—materials that hold time within them. I’m drawn to things that have lived other lives, things that are aged, broken, or forgotten. Through these fragments, I build new forms that feel suspended between reality and dream, presence and absence. Growing up along the U.S.–Mexico border, I’ve always lived in a space of duality—between cultures, languages, and perceptions. That in-between space deeply informs my work. I often explore what is unseen, erased, or silenced, giving shape to the invisible through layered compositions and symbolic structures. My pieces reflect a kind of quiet surrealism—where everyday materials take on new meaning, and the discarded becomes sacred. There is a strong emotional undercurrent in everything I make. I think of my work as an act of honoring—of recovering stories embedded in objects and allowing them to speak again. Whether I’m working with textiles, metal, or photography, I approach each piece as a process of discovery, letting intuition guide the arrangement until something meaningful emerges. My art invites viewers to slow down and step into a world where time, memory, and material blend into something unfamiliar yet deeply human. I want my pieces to feel like thresholds—spaces where the physical world softens, and something more poetic takes shape.
