Cristina Fletes-Mach

Cristina Fletes-Mach

by Cristina Fletes-Mach

Exhibition Dates: November 2025-April 2026

Location: A Gates

Where are you going? That’s an easy enough question to answer in an airport. Check your ticket. Check your terminal. Check your baggage. All of those will tell you where you’re going. But where are you from? Now that’s a much more difficult question to answer. Are you wanting to know what city I live in? Where I had my connecting flight? Or are you asking where I was born? Or the place I grew up in? The place where my ancestors are from? Where my skin, my hair, my language are from? The answer to that simple question: “Where are you from?” – can span a lifetime or many.

As the daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants born and raised in the American South and now living in the Midwest, my path has not been exactly  linear. Yet, while my individual story may be unique, the tale of human migration is not. Like a map, these stories of migration have twists and turns, dead ends and highways, valleys and peaks. Also like a map, they don’t fold back up into a tidy package.

Each of these portraits are painted on top of maps that form the collective identity of the person depicted. On the canvas, maps crinkle like clothing, and rivers and roads meander underneath the skin like veins. These portraits meld maps and memory, borders and bones, all while attempting to answer the ever-elusive question: Where are you from?