Monica Curiel (b. 1993, Dallas, Texas)
Monica Curiel is a multidisciplinary artist and designer working across relief painting, art objects, sculptural furniture, and lighting. Using construction materials such as spackling paste and plaster, introduced to her while working alongside her father on construction sites, she engages the cultural, familial, and labor histories embedded in materials commonly associated with utility rather than visibility.
Rooted in her experience as a first-generation Mexican American, Curiel’s practice explores identity, visibility, and cultural inheritance through materials that carry and reframe histories of labor and memory within contemporary Mexican American art and design.
Curiel studied fashion and interior architecture before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Kansas in 2021. Navigating a cancer diagnosis during this period contributed to the interdisciplinary and experimental nature of her practice.
Her work is held in the Denver Art Museum’s Architecture and Design collection and has received international recognition, including Dwell’s Dwell 24 (2024) and Sight Unseen’s American Design Hot List (2023). She has exhibited at Design Week México (2025) and Milan Design Week (2022), as well as Artsy’s Art in the Time of Corona (2021).
Photographed by Paul Miller