Maria ABando

What’s up. I’m Maria and I’m a self-taught artist, organizer and collaborator. I was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2017 with a B.S in Biology. Over the last four years, I’ve worked as a campaign organizer, a nonprofit program and development officer, and a fundraiser for a national voting justice. In many of those spaces, finding myself as the “only” person with a background like mine made me particularly adept at finding connections across differences, and building coalitions with an antiracist and justice focused approach. While I currently work full time at the University of Washington Women’s Center, I see my art as an inextricable piece of who I am. Throughout the years, as I grew as an organizer, I recognized that drawing helped me process things I was experiencing and leaned into exploring those moments with my art.

Drawing allows me to reflect on relationships, whether those are relationships with femininity, with the spaces I occupy, with my communities, with the past, or with myself. My art is often interwoven with elements of my identity as a mixed Black and Filipina woman, as a daughter of an immigrant, as a lifelong learner, and as a pusher for progress. I know that moving forward takes vulnerability, and often times the sharing of stories from those whose voices have yet to be fully heard. Visual imagery and expression provides an opportunity; a way to share those stories, a way to connect to something beautiful, and a way to feel.

Why Charcoal?

When it comes to my art, this is actually my most frequently asked question! Folks look at my drawings, and they imagine them in color, suggesting I try creating them with other media, urging me to think of how bright, how vibrant, how beautiful they have the potential to be.

I don't blame them. I agree. But, I already find them to be beautiful. Black. Is. Beautiful. And that is what I want to say.

I want to tell them to imagine. Imagine this huge white piece of paper; crisp and standard and intentional, and what we have. And I want them to imagine making a single line across the paper with charcoal.

The charcoal is rich. Striking against the white of the paper. The hue is deep and endless with possibility. I want them to imagine how energizing it is to watch that blackness begin to spread and grow as you draw, defying the emptiness of the paper and filling it with something different. Something honest, authentic, and genuine. Something creative. Something original.

I want to suggest that they put themselves in a place where the whiteness is an erasure, where it is harsh, cold, and unforgiving, feel themselves resist with every curl of their charcoal, feel the textures of the experiences and the stories they bear, emerge and dance across the page, liberated and shouting their presence, demanding that someone listen.

I want to urge them to envision themselves using their bare fingers to smear and smudge and see every shade and every quality of blackness. I want them to witness the complexity and motion of the seemingly organic way that the shades blend together to become an image. A story. An experience.

I want to say all this, but I don't. Instead, I agree that my drawings would be pretty with other colors, and wonder as I have time and time again, why black was not beautiful enough for them.

But who knows what the future holds!