Platos y Juegos
Tables, foods, dominoes, games and everyday objects become records of family, gathering and Puerto Rican culture.
Explore the work →Puerto Rican Artist · Art Historian · Educator
Hi, I'm Lynda.
I make art about memory, place, identity and the everyday things that quietly become part of who we are.
I am a Puerto Rican visual artist, muralist, art historian, educator and cultural storyteller working from Puerto Rico. Painting sits at the center of my practice, but the work also moves through public art, research, archives, workshops, commissions, writing and community learning.
Painting
Portraiture
Murals
Art History
Education
Puerto Rico
Artist, art historian, mother, homeschool educator
and professional rabbit-hole follower.
Puerto Rico Based
Original Art
Public Art
Art History
Museum + Cultural Programs
Available for Travel
The Throughline
I keep coming
back to home.
Home is not always a building. Sometimes it is a person, a street, a color, a bowl on the table, the sound of dominoes, a plant beside a wall, sunlight through a window or a story that keeps following us after we leave.
My work looks closely at Puerto Rican memory, family history, everyday traditions, Caribbean nature and the small rituals through which culture survives.
I want the work to be thoughtful enough to study, but human enough to recognize yourself in.
Art history made those questions even bigger. I became interested not only in what museums preserve, but in what families preserve, what neighborhoods remember, whose stories enter the archive and which lives have been pushed outside the traditional canon.
How I Got Here
A studio shaped
by movement.
I earned my B.A. in Art History from CUNY Queens College in New York and continued making art while life moved my family through very different places.
New York
Virginia
Colorado
Germany
Puerto Rico
Years as a military spouse changed how I understood belonging. Moving made ordinary things more precious: foods, family stories, language, landscapes, objects and those tiny visual details that tell you where you are.
I am also a mother of three and a longtime homeschool educator. Teaching my own children strengthened something that now runs through all of my public education work: knowledge can be rigorous without becoming inaccessible.
The artist, the art historian, the homeschool mom,
the researcher and the storyteller are not separate jobs.
They keep teaching one another how to look.
Read more of the journey
My studio practice grew alongside family life, travel, education and community work rather than inside one neat, perfectly straight career path.
I have worked in acrylic and oil, created portraits, stretched and prepared canvases, painted on wood, produced digital illustration, developed murals, managed commissioned artwork and created work for both private and public spaces.
That path taught me to pay attention to how art functions outside the studio and to the many different ways people actually live with it.
Current Studio Threads
What I'm thinking
about now.
Much of my current work treats everyday Puerto Rican life as a kind of living archive.
Swipe to explore →
Better Than Yesterday
Puerto Rican mornings, landscape, botany, memory and the quiet visual details that make an ordinary day worth keeping.
See the work →Art as Archive
A growing investigation into how paintings, family stories, primary sources and everyday objects help culture travel forward.
Follow the research →The Practice
Art in more than
one form.
Different projects, same throughline: story, place, people and careful attention.
Swipe through what I do →
Painting + Portraiture
Original paintings and commissioned works centered on people, memory, place, Puerto Rican identity and everyday life.
Explore the art →Murals + Public Art
Site-responsive artwork made to belong to the business, neighborhood, organization or community where it lives.
Plan a project →Workshops + Cultural Programs
Artist-led experiences combining observation, making, history and storytelling for schools, museums, organizations, families and communities.
Gather around art →Art History + Cultural Storytelling
Research, writing and educational projects connecting art history, Puerto Rican artists, lived experience and the questions behind the work.
Follow a rabbit hole →Selected Experience
The work has lived
beyond my studio.
Exhibitions, public art, murals, archives and education have placed the practice inside museums, businesses, cultural spaces and communities.
Swipe through selected experience →
Plaza Carolina
Selected for the Emergente public-art initiative and created a permanent approximately 9 × 10-foot work in Puerto Rico.
MADMi
Exhibition experience within Puerto Rico's museum and cultural landscape.
Museo de Arte de Aguadilla y del Caribe
Work presented in a museum context connected to Aguadilla, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
Site-Specific Work
Murals and hand-painted commissions made for businesses, public-facing spaces and the people who gather in them.
See projects →Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín
Archival volunteer experience that strengthened my relationship to preservation, primary sources and Puerto Rican cultural memory.
Background
Studio practice
meets scholarship.
I earned my B.A. in Art History from CUNY Queens College. My research interests increasingly center Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Latin American and diasporic visual histories.
I am especially interested in the artists, communities and cultural stories that traditional art-history narratives have too often pushed toward the edges.
Research does not stay locked inside an academic box for me. It enters paintings, workshops, essays, homeschool resources, museum concepts and conversations with people who simply want to understand art a little better.
B.A. Art History
CUNY Queens College · Queens, New York
Fine Artist
Painting, portraiture, commissions, murals,
public art and site-responsive work.
Digital Artist + Illustrator
Digital illustration experience including
Procreate, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
Homeschool Educator
Long-term curriculum planning, teaching
and family-centered learning experience.
U.S. Army + DoD Creative Arts
Creative-arts and education volunteer experience
supporting children and military families.
Archives + Cultural Research
Primary-source research, preservation interests
and Puerto Rican cultural-history exploration.
Learning Out Loud
I don't only make art.
I like opening the door to it.
My educational work is built for curious people, including the ones who never thought art history was supposed to be for them.
Swipe through the learning projects →
Art Tea with Lyn
Art history, ordinary life, memory, observation and bigger questions allowed to sit at the same table.
Come have tea →Art Tip Jar
Save-worthy studio knowledge, practical art education and the little lessons artists often learn the hard way.
Pick up a tip →¿Quién es?
Artist stories and art-history rabbit holes, with a growing focus on Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American artists.
Meet an artist →Aprende Libre
Free, reliable resources, mini missions and homeschool-friendly ways for children, families, teachers and lifelong learners to follow curiosity.
Start learning →Behind the Work
A career doesn't happen
completely alone.
My practice is deeply connected to family, community and conversation.
Some ideas begin long before a canvas — around tables, on drives, while teaching my children, inside archives or while noticing something ordinary that suddenly refuses to feel ordinary anymore.
Motherhood, homeschooling, travel and ordinary days continually remind me that culture is not an abstract subject. It is something people live.
Tino Ashaw ↗
My husband and creative partner has supported selected projects behind the scenes through photography, video, media, networking, strategy and the kind of conversations that turn a passing thought into a plan.
His own creative work and perspective make him an important sounding board in the life surrounding my practice, especially when an idea needs to move from “what if?” into something we can actually build.
Visit Tino's site →
What I Believe
Art belongs where
life is happening.
In museums, absolutely. But also in kitchens, schools, restaurants, hotels, neighborhood walls, libraries, family homes, plazas, notebooks and conversations between people who may never call themselves “art people.”
Art can help us remember where we come from, question what we've been taught, gather around something meaningful and imagine what deserves to be carried forward.
One Practice · Three Doors
Collect. Gather. Learn.
You don't need to know exactly what you're looking for. Start with the door that makes you curious.
01
02
03
COLLECT
Original paintings, selected works and commissions made to live with people, not just hang near them.
Find the art →GATHER
Murals, workshops, cultural programs, public art and creative collaborations made for real places and people.
Make something together →LEARN
Art history, artist stories, studio knowledge, free learning resources and very good rabbit holes.
Follow your curiosity →