Micaela Amateau Amato

Micaela Amateau Amato makes paintings and sculptures that tell stories about family, memory, and belonging. Her work grows out of her Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish heritage and her family’s history of migration. She blends personal history with political urgency and spiritual reflection.

Her pieces often cross the line between painting, photography, and sculpture. Paintings and photographs become three-dimensional forms that suggest spaces from ancestral memory. Her materials include life-size portrait sculptures in cast glass, Cibachrome photographic portraits, archival montages, and painted images of earth, sea, and wind. Many works include glowing neon text in Ladino, the centuries-old Judeo-Spanish language of her ancestors, so the figures and landscapes seem to witness the stories being told.

Amateau Amato has had solo exhibitions in New York at Kornblee Gallery, Betty Parsons Gallery, and Bertha Urdang Gallery; in Chicago at Marianne Deson and Flatfile; and in Los Angeles at Acme, Angles, and Baum Silverman Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Women’s Art Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. She has also shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery and at major art fairs including Art Basel Miami Beach, LA Art Contemporary, the Armory Show at Navy Pier, Art Chicago, and Tokyo Art Expo.

Her work is held in the collections of SFMOMA, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Hessel Museum at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, the Vera List Collection, and the Rockefeller Collection. Private collectors include Eileen Guggenheim, Paula Cooper, and Lucy Lippard.

She is also an author, illustrator, and curator. Her new book is SILVERSTORIES: Parables of Memory and Dream. Her 50 gouache illustrations appear in Cara Judea Alhadeff’s Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, an environmental and social-justice fable. Her curated exhibitions and edited books include Couples Discourse, which features artist couples such as Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, and Brice and Helen Marden, and Uncanny Congruencies.

Her solo exhibition is on view now at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert. A traveling exhibition of her paintings and sculpture opens in 2027 at the South Bend Museum of Art.