Scenes From The City: Rebecca Nava
Writing and photography by Abby McGuire.
Nothing brings me warmth like an artist passionate about the world. For every person trying to find themselves, there is someone dedicated to the person they have already found. When stepping into the home and art studio of Rebecca Nava, I knew I was in the presence of a woman dedicated to all that she is and will be.
Guided by sidewalk chalk to the side door of her Northside home, Rebecca answers my knock with a calm smile. Her words are soft, detailing a beautiful life as we make our way to her personal studio space behind the house.
An unassuming door opens into a space pulsing with the energy of self-expression. Leftover art material reflecting sunlight spilling in from the overhead skylights catch my eye as I roam the studio. Rebecca apologizes, saying she wishes she had more of her art hanging up, however, I haven’t seen a room brimming with personal work like hers since art school.
I feel a sense of rest among the paint pallets and study materials that surround Rebecca. She is a painter through a through. No surface is missing a colorful stroke, whether it had been placed there intentionally or not.
In recent months, she has been diving back into her practice. With her two children in kindergarten and preschool, her free time to create has expanded. Her multimedia approach has my eyes trailing off throughout our conversation, trying to understand the depth of her paintings fully.
She says that art creates an opportunity to gather all that we know about personal experiences, the natural and human-made world, and imagination to create something like a story. In her case, she shares her journey and world view on canvases and the walls of Cincinnati.
As a child of immigrants from Mexico, she often traveled there and spent time living in Puerto Rico. She reminisces about the energy, movement, and freedom that existed there and was lacking in the Sycamore Community School District where she finished high school. In Puerto Rico, from age 7 to 14, she felt energized and accepted, making it hard to return to Cincinnati, where she was often the only Latina in the room. She took on a business degree at Xavier University, feeling so lost and pressured to succeed, only to return to the advice of an old high school art teacher: apply to art school. So she set her sights on the U.C. College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning [DAAP], assigning herself into every art class until she got in.
Her intrigue with Mesoamerican culture falls on and off of canvases across the room. Creatures of mystic nature, brought to life by bursts of color and movement, are reminiscent of her Mayan and Aztec ancestors. Rebecca tells me she has more art to make and volumes to share with the writing systems that have inspired her work for years.
“Never let rules deter your will,” she tells me. “Because most times, your will is greater than the rules.”
It all started with a pre-Columbian art history class she took at the DAAP. Enthralled by the vastness of language and the stories it creates, she began to place these systems in her work. A mentor guided Rebecca, whom she speaks so highly of, Frank Herrmann of the DAAP fine arts program. The way he spoke of art as a spiritual thing, with the strength of mystery and discovery of feeling, electrified her.
As she describes her journey through painting, her hands outline the air and travel back to rest on her heart. The love she feels for art moves through her, welcoming me to experience it with her.
In her final years at DAAP, one of Herrmann’s heroes, John Walker of Boston University, came to visit and speak on his art. Sitting in on his lecture, Rebecca found herself lost in the world he created, wanting a life in art just as he was pursuing.
During Walker’s visit, he viewed two of her paintings. He loved one of them, and invited her to apply to Boston for her masters. She was late to apply, but resisted the rules and took a year off to spend time in Cincinnati.
After graduating from DAAP in 2000, she received grant money to curate a show featuring other Latin American artists in the city. The next year she found herself studying under Walker in the art department of Boston University. My mind swims in all that she has discovered and achieved as she tells me more about her experiences.
I am amazed by Rebecca, the way she soaks up anything in her wake and uses it to fuel her journey in understanding what it means to be human. She takes everything on, never feeling limited. Reaching further for her education, she took on an independent study after finding the Peabody Museum at Harvard University full of Mesoamerican literature and art. She dove in with the Harvard faculty, furthering her passion for her culture.
She paved a path for herself in a way I haven’t seen. I’ve broken the rules and snuck around authority in college, but not with the passion of pursuit like Rebecca. “Never let rules deter your will,” she tells me. “Because most times, your will is greater than the rules.” Her smile after saying it makes me feel ready to knock on any and all doors, no matter the cost. She lives by asking for forgiveness instead of permission.
And upon her return from Boston, she knocked on ArtWorks’ door after the deadline to apply and left with a job in 2007.
Ten or so years later, she has helped lead painting seven murals across the city, including one of her designs in Madisonville. Humbled by the voice art creates, she also dove into a teaching career. She has experience teaching everything from renaissance art history, drawing, painting, and design theory at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Cincinnati State, and Miami University.
Teaching at the Art Academy and Cincinnati State this semester, she goes on to tell me how inspired she continues to be by students, helping her in her own practice.
She heads off to pick up her kids from school, leaving me to mull over the rule-breaking that helped her achieve such a full and enlightening art practice. Rebecca let me in on one of the most important Mayan values: pursue passions under surface-level rules. Rebecca has shown me that underneath the facade of rules, there is a higher path to finding the truth beyond what others may expect of you, with many more doors to knock on.
Community Mix is our monthly hodge-podge of content from the voices of a hodge-podge of beautiful Cincinnatians. This is Scenes from the City, where the poetic mind that is Abby McGuire uncovers Cincinnati's hidden gems. Got suggestions? Email Abby.