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Maru Aponte

“My grandmother always saw her drawings as painting and I didn't understand. My base or introduction was that there was a difference or a separation from the two. Now that I'm more knowledgeable with arts, I find I connect to that a lot, especially with the medium that I use. Watercolor is expected to be used for drawing, or the preliminary medium before finishing a painting, rather than what I'm doing with the material. Now I’m like, no, this is the beginning, and this is going to be the end or the life of the work.”

Maru Aponte (Puerto Rico, 1996) emerges through her exploration of watercolor, a medium she embraces as both a site of resistance and metaphor. Challenging its traditional and historical associations with “low art” and leisure, Aponte uses watercolor to navigate the fragility and fluidity of memory, surface, and place- especially within the context of contemporary diaspora. Her technique and relationship with surface become a way of carrying memory elsewhere, tenderly resisting erasure while preserving cultural specificity.

Her paintings and drawings, executed both in the studio and en plein air, investigate color and light as phenomena through which she coexists and observes nature. In redefining landscape, she evokes an intense sense of place that reflects her Caribbean experience and identity. Aponte recently earned her MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. She previously attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated from the Painting Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She was the 2023 Emily Carr Fellowship Resident at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, a 2024 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and is currently a 2025 resident in the AGO x RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program at the Art Gallery of Ontario.