CSB Fine Arts | Contemporary Art Gallery

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to a Puerto Rican mother and Guatemalan father, Emilia Barrientos earned her BA in Painting from the University of Puerto Rico in 2008 after an early career in fashion design, including a win at the New Millennium Designers contest at age 15. Known for her material art, working resin and plaster into textured, often black-toned compositions, she has since built a reputation through solo shows at Guatibirí Gallery and San Juan Bautista, with work held in private and institutional collections across the island.

Her latest series, NIKTE', the Maya word for flower, turns to painting as a language for migration, memory, and cultural inheritance. Rather than depicting real places, Barrientos builds imagined landscapes through layered surfaces, veils of color, and suspended marks that evoke seeds, pollen, spores, and root systems, forms that read as living structures in motion. The paintings are built through accumulation, with layers emerging, disappearing, and resurfacing much like memory itself, so each piece records a process of growth rather than a fixed outcome. Drawing on her own Puerto Rican and Guatemalan roots, the series treats belonging as something continually reshaped rather than fixed or inherited whole, much like a flower dispersing its seeds or roots finding new ground, identity changes form without losing its connection to where it began.