Luisa Mesa is a Cuban‑American visual artist based in Miami and represented in Tampa, FL by Drew Marc Gallery. Her work includes meditative and improvisational drawing, painting, collage, digital compositions, installations, and glass works. Rooted in repetition, layering, and intuitive process, her art explores the invisible forces that animate reality.
Born in Havana, Cuba, Mesa emigrated to the U.S. as a child and eventually settled in Miami, where she pursued her love of art academically and professionally. After studying business and working in finance, she made a bold pivot—returning to school at Miami‑Dade College before earning a BFA in Painting and Photography at Florida International University, graduating magna cum laude in 2006.
During her time at FIU, she explored stream-of-consciousness drawing and developed the foundational technique of repetitive, organic mark-making. Her thesis installation at the Frost Art Museum, Meditations Installation 1 (2006), featured nearly 100 small drawings on circular wood pieces arranged around a central void, symbolizing gravitational or existential pull.
Mesa describes her work as driven by an “unseen” animating force. Each piece begins with layers of repetitive drawing—lines and forms that evolve organically into cellular, cosmic, or botanical-like structures. She works intuitively, allowing process to lead concept. Her materials vary widely—from ink and enamel to acrylics, watercolor, gouache, found objects, and digital imagery.
In both abstract and figurative pieces, Mesa often incorporates vintage or personal photographs. She integrates these faces or figures into contemporary formations, exploring notions of transcendence, memory, and interconnectedness. For instance, her 2012 series Forever United reflects on familial bonds across life and death, integrating extracted photographic figures with repetitive drawing and paint.
Her meditative mandalas, Meditations Series, and mixed-media installations embody a dialogue between fragmentation and unity, echoing influences such as Jackson Pollock and Chuck Close. Close’s grid-based portraits resonate with Mesa’s emphasis on how tiny fragments combine to create a greater whole.
From 2007–2011, Mesa was an artist-in-residence at Art Center South Florida (now Oolite Arts), following an earlier year at The Bakehouse Art Complex in Wynwood.
Her solo exhibitions include:
- Meditations, Connections, Fragmentation at Duane Reed Gallery, St. Louis (2009)
- Introspections at Highlands Museum, Sebring, FL (2010)
- Summer Show at CGAF Gallery, Coconut Grove, FL (2011)
- They Are Everywhere at John C. Favalora Museum, Miami (2019)
Group shows include numerous exhibitions throughout Florida and abroad, such as Portals and Passages(Pennsylvania 2024), Shared Thought: Collaborating with AI (Seattle 2024), Florida: In Transformation (St. Petersburg 2022), and About Women (Delray Beach 2022), among others.
Her work is included in corporate and public collections—Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Four Seasons Dubai, Morgan Stanley, Sloan Kettering, and others.
Mesa’s process is deeply meditative: silent, repetitive mark-making that fosters a calming flow state. She begins most pieces with ink pens or oil markers, layering intuitively and letting each piece unfold organically.
She often works in silence, embracing improvisation over perfect planning: “Process > Concept.” Her creative impulse comes from a profound, compulsive need to create—”when I make art all is good in my life.”
Mesa’s evolving practice incorporates digital media and even AI. She merges scanned drawings and vintage photographs using Photoshop and graphic tablets, balancing tactile artistry with digital techniques. This bridging reflects a fascination with placing historical figures into imagined modern realms, questioning the solidity of time and memory.
She anticipates that AI will play an increasing role in the creative process, especially for emerging artists.
Luisa Mesa’s body of work is a lyrical exploration of the imperceptible forces that bind us—be they energetic, familial, temporal, or cosmic. Through repetitive drawing, layered abstraction, and sensitive integration of personal imagery, she manifests art that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
Mesa invites viewers into nonlinear, multidimensional visual worlds—where fragmented forms converge into vibrantly unified totalities, and the past resonates within ever-changing present realities.
With an oeuvre grounded in ritual, intuition, and experimentation, Mesa continues to evolve, forging a rich dialogue between human memory, invisible energies, and visual emergence.
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