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Maru Aponte

KEY WORDS

art residency, creative process, early art memories, ballet vs painting, family influence, artistic expectations, material experimentation, watercolor, multicultural connections, artistic career, failure as learning, ancestry, inspiration, artistic community, personal growth

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.

This conversation took place in May 2025.

So, we're in your studio. I usually already have some sort of familiarity with the person I’m talking to for Ceremony, so I start off with how we met. With us, we were connected through Tatum (Art Forecast), so this is the first time we’re meeting, which is new for me! How are you connected with Tatum?

Tatum and I have a friend in common who introduced us. We connected before I came to Toronto. It's been nice to have someone who's facilitating me meeting other people who are interested in or related to the same things that I am in Toronto. 

That is really nice. It's tricky to know what's happening if you don't have a friend directing you a bit.

Toronto is way bigger compared to other places I’ve been. It's funny how places that are bigger in population might have way more people and way more things going on, but that also can make it more difficult to know or to learn or to contact. It's a paradox in that sense.

Totally. So, you're here doing a residency at the AGO, where we are right now. Have you always considered yourself an artist? What was your first introduction to art?

“ I feel like ‘artist’ is a label that has given me an excuse to be accepted, to show that I'm fully committed to it to other people, but in the end, I feel like I'm just a creative person, doing.”

– Maru Aponte

I mean, I've always considered myself someone very creative, and I've always been doing things with the title of artist. I feel like it's a label that has given me an excuse to be accepted, to show that I'm fully committed to it to other people, but in the end, I feel like I'm just a creative person, doing. Yes, I am an artist, I can take the label now, but I don't remember a moment waking up one day deciding I'm gonna call myself an artist, if that makes any sense.

The first thought I had when you asked that question was one of my first memories of making art. When I was a kid, I think I was between five and six, my mom had put me in ballet. I remember taking the classes, practicing for recital, and the moment of the actual event, the recital, I didn't come on stage. My mom came back, and she was like, what's going on? What happened? And I was like, I don't like how they're telling me to dance. I just want to dance, dance, you know? I just want to be able to dance and not be so structured. Obviously that’s language I have now, but I just didn't want it to be told what to do. So, my mom was like, Okay, that's not the avenue we're going then. That's how I was introduced to painting or drawing in general. My mom put me in a school called La Liga de Arte in Old San Juan.

I wanted to show you my early work, because my mom kept a lot of my drawings and paintings and when I was doing my Masters I re-found them hidden somewhere. And I was like, Oh, my God. What is this? Why is this sitting here? My room back home in Puerto Rico is full of all my early work. This is an early painting of mine. That's what I aim still to do with my own practice, be that loose.



I remember finding it at a moment where I was feeling stuck in my studio and asking, what am I doing? I feel like it's normal to ask that question but when I found this I was like, oh my god, it’s so nice not to ask what am I doing? and just focus on the doing.

So, every time I go home, when I wake up, that's the first thing I see. My room back home still has a lot of paintings that I made when I was very young. But, yeah, this one is just a house full of fruits. It's very colorful. I feel connected, especially with this painting, to how I approach painting today, or just making art in general, very loose, very going over the line, not caring where it's supposed to end, putting the line where I want to put the line.

I love that.

And I remember the space where I took those classes. The school has been there probably more than 50 years now. Every time I go to Puerto Rico I visit El Viejo San Juan. I live 20 minutes away from it, and it's quite special. The view. I swear they have the same furniture. It's crazy. It's like time traveling, having memories from that age.

This is one of the few memories that I can tell you. I really remember being there, taking a class, being in touch with the materials, and looking outside to the view. It's just an incredible view of the ocean in El Morro, which is one of the old historic monuments in Puerto Rico. There’s a lot of wind. That's where people go to fly kites. So you look outside and see so many colors in the sky. There's something very special about the place. That's my earliest memory doing art. I wasn’t thinking that I was an artist, I was just doing.

Yeah that feels so in contrast with ballet as well and you being told what to do.

I definitely always had a problem with being told what to do.

Well, I think this is something so interesting with creativity. I grew up dancing and I loved it so much. I felt so like, oh, this thing makes me feel so much and I can finally express myself and feel like myself. When people try to constrain it and put it in a box or tell you exactly how to do the thing, it's this tension in creativity. It’s a craft but it’s also someone's authentic expression of themselves and other people trying to tell you how to be yourself is ... 

Or telling you that it's wrong the way you're doing it. Also dealing with other people's expectations. Yeah, ballet was not for me. My mom was right.

And that's incredible that she listened to you, and was like, Okay, we're gonna find something else.

Yeah. Also being that young, and being able to be like, I actually don't like this.

“ People don't verbalize what they expect from you. It's just a feeling that something is being expected. So, the only way out is in, you know? Because it's not that they tell you, ‘I'm expecting you to make this type of work’, probably the only expectations that you're approaching are your own.”

– Maru Aponte

Yeah, you knew. Were you around artists growing up?

I definitely grew up around people who were making art, but they were not fully dedicating themselves to doing art. I think a big influence for me has been my grandmother.

I grew up with a grandmother who was very creative and very resilient. My grandmother is Cuban, so they had to migrate from Cuba during the Fidel regiment. Because of that process of migration my grandmother had to take the biggest role of the family. She had three jobs. She had to maintain my mother, her mother, and eventually my aunt and all the nephews. It was a lot. But she was very creative, she was a very smart woman, and she did a lot of drawing on her own time. I always found it beautiful.

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.

I always saw my mom in the afternoon, but it was my grandmother in the morning and she was the one who picked us up from school, took us to all the extra curriculum. She had three rooms in her house, and there was one room she gave me for my playground, which is still my studio. That's the room where I've always been able to stimulate my creativity when I'm home. She actually never took painting classes until she was 80. She was someone that I was very inspired by.

Also my father learned to play a traditional Puerto Rican instrument called the cuatro. It's a type of guitar. I remember having a conversation with him recently, asking when he learned. He was quite young. He wasn't really sporty but once his brother brought the guitar home, he just picked it up, and with his ear, he picked up a song that was playing. So the next week my uncle brought him a guitar. He eventually was in a traditional Puerto Rican, I would say orchestra. He doesn't play in any groups anymore, but he’s still very, very in contact with the instrument and the guitar. So yeah, maybe those are the two direct links.

My other grandmother from my father's side passed away before I met her. But I know there was a lineage of making and sewing. So I feel something very creative there. And there was a time before I committed to painting that I did some sewing and fashion design.

That's beautiful. So, that feeling of not wanting to be told what to do as a kid, has that come up through your practice and being in school and showing work? How have you managed expectations as you've progressed through your art career?

I mean, to be honest, I'm very impulsive. I'm still figuring out how to respond to things, but being very impulsive also allows me to connect very well with myself when something feels right and when something doesn't feel right. When I really don’t feel right I try to listen to how I'm physically reacting. I literally have IBS, so I can tell you immediately when my stomach gets upset or something doesn't feel right. My body's gonna know before I process it. Your brain is not the only thing that thinks, you know?

I'm curious if there's been moments in maybe your education or practice where you might feel stuck in a situation where you're like, this doesn't feel right, but I have to move through it and how you go about it?

I mean, to be honest,  I immediately think about when I was learning how to paint in undergrad. It's taboo to talk about it, because they don't really directly say it. And I feel like, right now, I'm not just a painter. I'm doing other projects, and I'm not putting myself under any limitations creatively with a label. But I was trained as a painter, and when I was doing my undergrad, there isn't a direct saying that ‘this is the expectation for it to be a good painting…’ but there is. You know that for it to be considered a good painting is that it had to be big, it needs to be oil, and it needs to be colorful. At least when I was an undergrad, I thought that was what they expected me to do. I had been doing watercolor for a really long time, but at that moment, I maybe didn't see or acknowledge the presence of it in my own practice. I saw it as a preliminary before doing a painting in oil, you know.

When I was in my master's there was this moment where I realized I was trying to make everything look like my small watercolors. I was doing a lot of material experimentation, which, I learned a lot. I now understand materiality differently. Each material has their own personality. Each material has its own qualities. I had a realization that with watercolor, I've always been very precious about it, but I never gave it the space or shared the space that it takes in my own practice with other people.  For me, committing to that material and being like, you know what? I’m not gonna be precious anymore. I'm not gonna care if it's oil, if it's the permanency, like, I don't care. This isn't what the point of the work is anymore. You know? Like, it's giving me, as a person, so much that I want to put it on a platform and be like, this is what it is, and I appreciate it, and I think it has a lot of potential.

I feel like there's this expectation of permanency with art, the assumption of a type of continuity, but watercolor has so much life of its own. It's funny, because a lot of the times expectations, they're not said. People don't verbalize what they expect from you. It's just a feeling that something is being expected. So, yeah, the only way out is in, you know? Because it's not that they tell you, ‘I'm expecting you to make this type of work’ like, probably the only expectations that you're approaching are your own because it's what you think they think, but they never verbalize. So it's actually not confirmed. So I just stopped wanting it to be something else and was like, okay, you know what, you're giving me so much. I want to give back to you, but as a dialogue directly to material.

“ Sometimes it's also about timing. Like, if things don't work out. It's not that it's not going to eventually. But I know it's very difficult to deal. I’m not saying I have it figured out, I just feel like when I touch rock bottom, I remember things that happen in the studio that have been failures have opened doors to something else. ”

– Maru Aponte

Yeah, people are really focused on permanency and things lasting forever. I feel like that is a perfect sort of segue into the question of what you hope to leave behind for the archeologists of the future.

I love that question. Since the work is watercolor, I feel like the paintings won’t get old. They're gonna grow, in a sense.

What do you mean by that? That's so beautiful.

Well, for example, you and me, we’re composed of so much water, you know? So when you're working with a medium that depends so much on another natural element, I'm channeling what's happening. In a lot of the decisions I'm collaborating with the paint. It's not like, oh, I made that. No, I reacted to what the material did. I'm responding to it. A lot of the things that happened within the paintings, I didn't make that call (Maru points to a painting). I'm just respecting that call. It's very lively. For me, it’s growing.

It’s so relational, yeah.

Rather than thinking that just it will age, we both will age. We're aging together. It also depends on your perspective on time. For me, it's just gonna grow and how people interact with it is gonna make it grow. It's, in a way, a cycle.

I'm very curious. I hope that the work can reflect what my experience has been making it. I put so much energy into it, and it's a decision. I'm deciding to put my time and my energy into making art, but this is because it gives me way more back, you know? It gives me double, triple back, way more than what I spend, or invest in it. So if that's something that's transmitted and it's giving back to other people, and not even people, maybe more than human aspect, then I think I would be satisfied.

I hope in the future, the work can still function as a way of multiculturalism because it's the way the work has been developed. Because of art I've been able to travel, I've been able to live elsewhere, not just visit, but actually live, make connections, communicate, meet people, you know? Have actual relationships with people. If it weren’t because of the work, we wouldn't be sitting here today and having this talk and having a conversation. So if the work can still do that, well, I did what I had to do. I hope the future is way more multicultural. I think in my head, I thought we were gonna be 25 years more advanced that what the reality is today. But I hope the work can still unite different people in the way it has for me, having that experience of being in Puerto Rico, being in Canada, being in  Belgium, and being in the US, making those links and moments of connection. That's what I hope.

“I hope in the future, the work can still function as a way of multiculturalism because it's the way the work has been developed. Because of art I've been able to travel, I've been able to live elsewhere, not just visit, but actually live, make connections, communicate, meet people, have actual relationships with people. If it weren’t because of the work, we wouldn't be sitting here today and having this talk and having a conversation, you know? So if the work can still do that, well, I did what I had to do.”

– Maru Aponte

Yes, yeah. I love that, yeah. There's so much in there. My challenge with all these interviews always is like, don't make them three hours long. I have a million more questions.

That question you had at the beginning, who or what do you bring forward with you in your life and work, I do think about that a lot. I didn't grow up being able to view that much art. I mean, I grew up in Puerto Rico. At the moment there might be more access to art, but we didn't grow up with museums with crazy collections or those type of galleries. It was a very different experience.

And growing up I wasn't introduced to any female artists. I do understand that had to do with the access. In Puerto Rico, very little female artists are given the opportunity to share their work. There's a lot of makers but you don't get to see them. So I didn't grow up with having someone as an example. And my parents worked very hard, they were working class, so, if I can do it, I feel like a lot of people can do it. A lot of people can try to go elsewhere, meet other people, have more access to what the actual world is. It's not just like an island or the US, it's different cultures, different interactions.

I think that's one of the biggest things I would love to share, to motivate people to actually do it. It's very scary. Also being an emerging artist, especially nowadays, trying to have a sustainable career anywhere is super difficult, but, I need to do it. I cannot, not do the work. The process also shows you a different understanding of failure. I think that's something important to share with people. Failure can open a door to something else. It's all about perspective, and I feel like I've been only able to learn that, or keep my sanity, from making.

I feel that. I feel like so many life lessons come from creating and expressing yourself and just seeing where that goes. I’ve been thinking a lot about the lessons that it offers you, or the confrontations with yourself, maybe, in the processing of rejections or failures.

You could see rejections as the universe telling you that this isn't the path to go on, or you can go inward and really wonder, like, what is it that I'm committed to? If it is this, then how am I moving forward with it? And, yeah, what does this external validation have to do with what I'm doing? I think when your work is so much bigger than yourself, like the way that you describe yours, how do you not recommit?

Yeah. Sometimes it's also about timing. Like, if things don't work out, it's not that it's not going to eventually. But I know it's very difficult to deal. I’m not saying I have it figured out, I just feel like when I touch rock bottom, I remember things that have happened in the studio that have been failures have opened doors to something else.

Yeah, I feel like you have a lot of trust in the process, and in your relationship to the work. I can hear that balance of knowing it's out of your hands a little bit, because, like you said, what you're able to trust is that when you put work into it, it ends up giving back to you. So it's like, okay, a day at a time.

Yeah, yeah. And it’s not just giving back to me visually, but in all these other contexts of living, being alive, and connections. It gives back to me through connecting with people, with places, with new experiences. It's all because of the art, you know? I would be such a different person if I wouldn't have pushed through in a way or not listened to the work.

“ You and me, we’re composed of so much water, you know? When you're working with a medium that depends so much on another natural element, I'm channeling what's happening. In a lot of the decisions I'm collaborating with the paint. It's not like, ‘oh, I made that.’ No, I reacted to what the material did. I'm responding to it.”

– Maru Aponte

What type of ancestor do you hope to be?

It's interesting, because when I think of ancestry it’s like, I'm not here anymore.

“ I was like, I don't like how they're telling me to dance. I just want to dance, dance, you know? I just want to be able to dance and not be so structured. Obviously that’s language I have now, but I just didn't want it to be told what to do .”

– Maru Aponte

I find this question cool because people think about it in so many different ways. I asked one person, and they were like, ‘are there different types?’ Or my friend Bianca in her interview was just like, I love thinking of people looking back on things I've done, trying to figure it out, make all this meaning with it when, really, it was a joke.

You've sort of alluded to this already, but the spirit of your work, if it could be translated somehow and offer connection with whoever finds it or whatever finds it, then I think that is obviously a piece of ancestry, too. So much of your work, all the themes are so much bigger than yourself. It has a life of its own.

Yeah. I feel like, to just go for it would be my like, I don't even know, like, just do it.

*laughs* 

Yeah, take the jump. I don't even know how I would translate that as an ancestor. I mean, if you need a push, I'll come into your dream, and be like, what are you doing? I'll try to tap in, in the way I can. That’s all I can say. If I'm bored, I'll come in and I'll check in, and make sure you're going for it.

I love it, I love it, I love it. Do you have any song, movie, phrase, quote, anything on repeat right now?

I mean, right now I’m listening to a podcast on Canadian history. I want to know where I'm at.

Yeah, that’s important for sure.

Yeah. The last show I saw that moved me and got me very excited, like I wanted to go to the studio and make things, you know? That energy. His name is Joe Overstreet. I saw the exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. I saw it maybe a week before coming to Toronto. The work was just very exciting, giving possibilities and things that I thought I couldn't do. I was like, oh, actually, I can. That feeling motivates me. It was the colours, composition, how things were placed and hung in the space, they were flowing but were still paintings. The shape and colours and scale were so cool. The name of the show was, Taking Flight. So this was the last thing I saw that I was like, this is good.

I love that. And I love how you said it gave you the feeling of possibilities. I think about creativity playing that role a lot, for lack of better words. It can really open our minds to ideas like, ‘I didn't know I could use a colour like that,’ or introduce the element of surprise. I think that feeling of possibility or surprise does a lot for our mental health.

Yeah, when I saw the work the first thing I thought was shape, not following what's expected, and being surprised. The element of surprise is difficult, and when I feel it, I'm gonna stay with that feeling for some time.

MARU APONTE

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.