Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: All That Before Us

Artsy
10/13/26

All that Before Us is rooted in intergenerational empowerment, lineage, and a shared reverence for materials; the unique connection between Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood underpins this exhibition.

Press Release
Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present All That Before Us: Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, a two-person exhibition at our New York City gallery. All That Before Us will be on view at our New York City gallery from September 10 to November 27, 2026. Employing time-honored craft techniques, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood create work that uniquely balances fine art and technical skill. Their practice explores compelling themes such as migration, gender equality, and multicultural identity. Ruiz-Healy Art is proud to participate in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide initiative led by Craft in America to honor the handmade during America’s Semiquincentennial. Through the exhibition, we join museums, artists, and organizations nationwide in celebrating craft traditions that connect us across history and time.

Rooted in intergenerational empowerment, lineage, and a shared reverence for materials, the unique connection between Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood underpins this exhibition. Datchuk presents a collection of ceramics and sculptures that invite viewers to look more closely at the frameworks surrounding the female and the labored body. Simultaneously, Jimenez Underwood presents a body of work that utilizes textile and sculptural components to explore and challenge systems that have built both human division and connection. Dismantling material hierarchies and championing the handmade are essential to the shared artistic language of Jimenez Underwood and Datchuk.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood is the daughter of migrant agricultural workers, a Chicana mother, and a father of Huichol Indigenous descent. Her work reflects personal experiences and depicts the world through her tri-cultural lens. In the tradition of the rebozo textile in Mesoamerican Indigenous culture, Indigenous women were, in their own right, historic archivists. The rebozo was more than a shawl; it was a document of culture, history, and memory made of threadwork. An important motif in Jimenez Underwood’s work, the traditional importance of the rebozo is carried across time from a pre-colonial context into the modern world as a method of capturing contemporary culture. In Raining Barbed Wire Rebozo, the rebozo format combines with another of Jimenez Underwood’s motifs: barbed wire. In this work, the artist incorporates leather barbed wire, imbuing this rebozo with a complex oxymoron of texture and context. Often a shorthand for borders or human separation, barbed wire is woven into Rebozo’s threads, as though the artist has stepped into the role of an archivist documenting the division in our world today. She explains, “Empowered by the voices of my Indigenous maternal ancestors, I began to cross the intellectual borders that separated the hand and the mind (craft) from the spirit (fine art).”

Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s work explores the societal, cultural, and political systems women navigate through porcelain, adornment, blue and white patterns, reflective surfaces, and synthetic and human hair via installation, objects, and video. In juxtaposition, her pieces explore how relegation to the domestic, mother-sphere annihilates the innocence of girlhood and locks women into a controlled space of servitude. Datchuk uses race as a lens to narrow her demonstration of the circles Asian women in particular are allowed to operate within. Her work, Girl Fight, inspects not a brawl between two young women in the schoolyard but the internal fight that happens within oneself. No matter how empowered, no matter what women have attempted to reclaim, they still find themselves moving back and forth among choices dictated by outside patriarchal narratives. The two porcelain Song dynasty-inspired pot forms of Girl Fight are incised with chinoiserie imagery of Datchuk’s visual vocabulary – fertility figurines, aliens, bobby pins, maternal DNA structures, pregnancy tests, and combs. The internal fight is subject, the physical becomes object, and clay is body – the pot form and its shared language of the human form. Sprouting from the neck of the pots is Asian curly and straight human hair that comes together in one giant knot and depicts how dualities are complicated and very personal.

Throughout the exhibition, Datchuk and Jimenez Underwood reimagine traditional materials and time-honored forms, bridging gaps between the ancestral and the contemporary, exploring systems of power, and the nuances of identities within those systems. All That Before Us invites viewers to consider the movement of time, how we view the past, and how we allow it to inform the present.

Original post here.