Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, October 20, 2025 : Betsabeé Romero, a Mexican visual artist, installation artist (#2423)

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Artist of the Day, October 20, 2025 : Betsabeé Romero, a Mexican visual artist, installation artist (#2423)

Betsabeé Romero (1963) is a Mexican visual artist. Her works include sculptures, installations, printmaking, perforated paper, photographs, and videos. She has exhibited widely, and has been featured in more than forty one-person exhibitions in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Betsabeé Romero earned her Bachelor of Arts (Licenciatura en Comunicación) at the Universidad Iberoamericana (1980–1984). She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Academia de San Carlos in 1986.She also studied at the Louvre and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After studying in France, she returned to Mexico to study pre-Hispanic and colonial art, earning a second master's degree in Art History from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1994.

She intentionally chooses materials that have been used and discarded. Some of her favorite materials are worn-down automobile tires and other car parts. Through sculpture and painting, she transforms these everyday materials to create "refashioned cars, carved tires, painted hoods, and incised mirrors." They are overlaid with images and symbols inspired by Mexican history and culture, ranging from pre-colonial to present times. Tires and cars also serve as symbols of mobility and human migration.

Many of Romero's works combine aspects of sculpture and printmaking, as she pairs modern materials with traditional imagery. She carves textures, patterns, and symbols onto the surface of large discarded tires, treating the rubber as if it were wood. Sometimes she uses the sculpted wheels as giant printmaking rollers to create elaborate textile patterns or tracks in clay.

The materials themselves have significance in a global context, evoking a history of colonialist exploitation as well as recycling and renewal. Natural rubber comes from the milky sap of Hevea brasiliensis, a tree that is indigenous to Brazil.

Through clever inversions of meaning and material, Romero's works question the way in which modern industry appropriates and transforms natural elements such as clay, rubber, and gum for mass production.

In 2018, Romero was featured as the fourth artist in the National Museum of Women in the Arts-organized New York Avenue Sculpture Project. Four sculptures of carved, painted tires were the first works to be specifically commissioned for the project.

Betsabeé Romero has created a number of installations focused around the Day of the Dead. The Day of the Dead is a holiday that takes place in Mexico and Central America as a commemoration of the deceased. Its origins go back 3000 years, and reflect a fusion of pre-Hispanic culture and Catholic religion.

In 2015 Romero created an installation for the Day of the Dead at the British Museum. In the Great Court, she created an altar dedicated to the Unknown Immigrant. She drew upon folk traditions of paper and metal art, creating cantolla hot air balloons shaped like skulls out of tissue paper and tin calacas skeletons to float above the Great Court.

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