Through her large-scale works, Leticia Bajuyo engages audiences and connects with communities through her site-specific installations that involve community collections of media and memories. Bajuyo’s drawings, sculptures, and installations highlight the impact of desire and the machines that create even more desire.
Her interest in unpacking value perceptions find their roots in her autobiography growing up bi-racial in a small, rural town named Metropolis on the border of Illinois and Kentucky. The time and space of quiet landscapes outside and the multi-national dialogues inside her family’s house influenced the development of her critiques of consumer capitalism, fickle domestic desires, and internalized pressures of assimilation.
Bajuyo’s continued research of cultural privilege and consumer pressure yields a drive to both create and question a vision that is comfortable, contained, and controlled. By incorporating recognizable materials and forms including CDs, artificial grass, and insulation styrofoam, Bajuyo creates spaces and multi-layered experiences that invite audiences to participate in theatrical re- arbitrations of value.
A Filipinx-American interdisciplinary artist and object maker based in Oklahoma, Leticia R. Bajuyo started creating in rural Midwest flyover communities. Bajuyo received her B.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame and her M.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Fall 2022, Bajuyo joined the dynamic and inclusive faculty of the School of Visual Arts at The University of Oklahoma. Prior to this professorship in Oklahoma, she served as an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, a Visiting Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Notre Dame, and Professor of Art at Hanover College.
Recent solo exhibitions include the Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery in Dallas, Texas; Beeville Art Museum in Beeville, Texas; Hall Art Gallery at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi; and Rudolph Blume Fine Art / ArtScan Gallery in Houston, Texas.
Bajuyo's large-scale, site-specific artworks include creating installations at the From Waste to Art Museum in Baku, Azerbaijan; Market Square Park in downtown Houston, Texas; in the silos of the Site Gallery at Sawyer Yards in Houston, Texas; at the Nashville International Airport in Tennessee; and in the Tony Hillerman Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In addition to exhibitions of her individual artwork, Bajuyo seeks community and welcomes collaboration by participating in artist collectives and serving on the Boards of Directors for the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance and Public Art Dialogue.
24 Hours of Wonder - a growing archive and collective art installation that links together multiple artists through interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collaboration.
Project Vortex - an international not-for-profit collective of artists, designers and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through our work
Land Report Collective - a group artists in Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wyoming who create and exhibit artworks together as they deal with landscape in fundamental ways and as a foundational reference point
TLC Art Collective - three women who combine their individual work as a muralist, a sculptor, and a landscape architect to collaboratively design and create public art that is intrinsically community-focused
Filipinx Artists of Houston - a collective of Filipinx visual, performing, literary, culinary and multidisciplinary artists in Texas
ENID: Generations of Women Sculptors, an organization of female sculptors who gather and exhibit in respect of Louisville native and recognized sculptor Enid Yandell (1869-1934).