Quiet Stories Collection (2025).
Freedom wears many masks, but for women perhaps none feels as instinctive, or as poetic, as the bird, that creature suspended between earth and sky, always half in motion, always just beyond reach. It was already clear in Nelly Furtado’s 2000 hit song, ‘I’m Like a Bird,’ and now in Mariel Méndez’s latest collection that same idea finds a new visual life, where women and birds seem to mirror one another in their longing for lift, softness and self-definition. Speaking to Schön!, Méndez says her work has always been shaped by the spaces between things, and here that in-between feeling becomes especially moving.
Growing up sandwiched between the borders of Tijuana and San Diego does strange and wonderful things to a creative mind. Borders teach a person that identity remains layered, fluid and often negotiated on a daily basis. For Méndez, the border was never a simple geographical boundary but rather a continuous state of translation. Navigating two cultures, two languages and completely different aesthetic expectations formed the bedrock of her artistic identity. Today, Méndez operates as the Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist and founder behind MARALOVE.
Before launching her clothing brand in 2014, Méndez spent a decade working as a preschool and Montessori art teacher. Watching toddlers smear paint without a second thought about perfection radically rewired her own approach to creation. Swapping the classroom for the canvas, her trajectory took an unexpected turn after she applied acrylics to a client’s denim jacket. “Expression must feel safe before it can be honest,” she says. “Watching children create without fear of imperfection deeply influenced my figurative work. I don’t paint to impress – I paint to reveal. And in many ways, each piece is still negotiating the border within me.”
Yaz Reve.
That sense of negotiation sits at the heart of her work. Méndez paints women who feel full of feeling, the ‘Moody Girls,’ a recurring cast of characters born from the pages of her personal sketchbooks during a period of deep uncertainty. Méndez describes these figures as an accidental mirror of her own psyche, noting that as she sketched, their facial expressions would shift to match her internal temperature at the moment of creation. Her work lies in a refusal to be just one thing, capturing the freedom and femininity of being many different faces at once – a chameleon-like quality she conveys through a fearless use of pigment.
Taking cues from the Fauvist movement and its wild, clashing tints that prioritised feeling over fact, Méndez found herself particularly drawn to this artistic audacity. Henri Matisse’s vivid vision of life occupies a permanent place in her imagination, specifically for his willingness to let emotion take precedence over realism. She finds a kindred spirit in what she calls the “courage of colour” that defined that era, believing that hues should be felt rather than explained. “Fauvism taught me that colour can be autonomous, expressive, even rebellious,” Méndez says. “Colour, for me, is never decorative.”
Figures such as André Derain and Kees van Dongen encouraged her to let a bold chromatic language lead, while the work of Tamara de Lempicka shaped her understanding of the feminine form, balancing elegance with a certain raw power. By allowing texture to speak and beauty to remain imperfect, she rejects the idea that art must act as a polished mirror of reality. Her paintings instead become emotional landscapes where visible brushwork and layered pigment carry memory and feeling.
Colour Attraction Collection (2019–2020). Liberation Collection (2020–2021).
Her earlier bodies of work trace an evolving emotional rhythm. The ‘Liberation’ collection (2019–2020) emerged from an intimate need to exhale, with restrained tones and figures caught in moments of internal confrontation. As that weight lifted, the ‘Colour Attraction’ era (2020–2021) followed with a more expansive energy, where pink, green and blue were layered to heighten emotional intensity. “Colour became the catalyst because it demanded presence,” she says. “It required visibility, vitality and alignment.”
A shift to acrylic on paper defined the ‘Nonsense Perfection’ series (2021–2022), introducing immediacy through wandering lines and fragmented compositions. Here, Méndez leaned into unpredictability, exploring how meaning often unfolds over time rather than all at once. “I wanted the viewer to experience that transition from confusion to clarity as a metaphor for the way life reveals its meaning over time,” she says.
The ‘Self Resistance’ collection (2022) marks a visceral, high-stakes turning point where Méndez famously abandoned her brushes working exclusively with a palette knife. By ditching traditional tools, she invited a sense of productive chaos into the studio, using the blade to build up thick, unapologetic layers of paint.
The City Of Soul Collection (2025).
After years of extroverted brightness, her ‘Quiet Stories’ Collection (2025) represents a profound shift into stillness. Swapping heavy acrylics for tender pastels, the work envelops the feminine form in shades of lavender, lilac and peach. Birds appear throughout the series, not as an obvious emblem, but as a companion image, almost a second self hovering near the women in the work. Their presence changes the emotional temperature of the collection, giving it a sense of openness that feels deeply tied to the idea of women claiming their own airspace. The bird becomes a way of asking what freedom might look like if it were not abstract at all, but something lived in the body, something graceful and vulnerable at once.
Méndez tells us that the collection grew out of a need to slow down and listen more closely to what her figures were telling her. That gentler pace is visible in the lines, the palette and the atmosphere, all of which feel more tender than previous artworks while still holding onto the emotional charge that defines her practice. “Creating this collection helped me understand that not all strength is loud,” Méndez says. “During that season, I needed stillness. I needed spaces where vulnerability felt safe rather than exposed.” The bird, in that sense, becomes a companion to the women she paints, a way of holding fragility and aspiration in the same frame.
Quiet Stories Collection (2025).
Her mother’s intuitive brilliance with floral arrangements continues to shape how MARALOVE approaches physical spaces. She understood how a room could hold atmosphere in the same way a canvas holds paint. Environments are treated as extensions of the artwork, carefully balanced to guide emotion without excess.
La Vida Collection (2023), Jackie Gallardo. The City Of Soul Collection (2025), Yaz Reve.
Méndez now dedicates her time fully to MARALOVE, blending figurative expression with a strong focus on sustainability. Her daily practice centres on upcycling second-hand garments and accessories, bringing attention to recycling through transformation. For instance, her ‘When Fashion Meets Art’ collection is perhaps the most iconic example of this ethos, featuring hand-painted vintage denim jackets and structural blazers.
Meanwhile, her ‘La Vida’ collection showcases a more eclectic range, including hand-painted Paloma Picasso handbags and bespoke accessories like a fabric rose bucket bag designed specifically to complement a white pearl dress. These pieces, shaped by both memory and reinvention, have carried her work from local studios to exhibitions at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, as well as collaborations with the United Nations Feminist Task Force.
“For me, upcycling is not about correcting the past,” she explains. “I honour a garment’s previous life by allowing it to evolve. The silhouette becomes architecture. The fabric becomes language and the final image becomes a bridge between memory and reinvention.”
Looking ahead, Méndez seems less interested in repeating what has worked before than in continuing to let the work open out, feather by feather, towards a future where women, birds and colour remain in conversation with one another.
Quiet Stories Collection (2025), Yaz Reve.
photography. courtesy of Yaz Reve, Jackie Gallardo
words. Gennaro Costanzo
