Betsabeé Romero

In 2018, Romero was featured as the fourth artist in the National Museum of Women in the Arts-organized New York Avenue Sculpture Project. Four sculptures of carved, painted tires were the first works to be specifically commissioned for the project. They address "themes of migration and movement". Entitled as a group Signals of a Long Road Together, they will be shown for a two-year period on New York Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C. Used car tires are carved, painted with metallic paint, and assembled into "totemic structures" that use interior lighting to increase visibility. Huellas y cicatricez (Traces and scars) is a 16-foot stack of four tires, carved with figures of running mothers and children, hand in hand. Movilidad y tensión (Mobility and tension) stacks eight-halves of tires, engraved with a blend of Islamic and European designs reminiscent of Mudéjar symbols from ancient Spain. In En cautiverio (In captivity) slender steel columns hold up two tractor tires, whose surfaces are painted with intertwining serpents. Movilidad en suspenso (Mobility in suspense) is an assembly of four tractor tires whose treads are decorated with traditional Mexican patterns.

El Vuelo y Su Semilla (The Flight and Its Seed) examined interplaying themes of migration, colonization, food and traditional culture. It was shown by the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. and San Antonio, Texas` (2017). Each of five rooms featured a different type of work, some accompanied by Romero's poems. Trenzando raíces (Braided roots) at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Ontario (2018) was developed in collaboration with indigenous women from New Credit First Nation. They requested that one of the six pieces created remain at a ceremonial center in Mississauga.

Betsabeé Romero's installation Canto de Agua (Song of water) was held in the Zócalo of Mexico City (2016), and opened by the mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Ángel Mancera. The installation combined the cultural traditions of the Day of the Dead ofrenda or offering; the trajinera, a traditional type of flat-bottomed boat; and the social concerns of the present. 103 trajineras were decorated as offerings to commemorate those who had died during the year and to connect their deaths to social conditions and problems of Mexico City. The trajineras were created by Mexican artisans from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and reflect traditions of pre-Hispanic times in which trajineras circulated in Tenochtitlán.

Los huesos tienen memoria (Bones have a memory) at the Museo Dolores Olmedo (2016–2017) was dedicated to the almost 28 thousand missing persons registered by the Mexican federal government. Romero incorporated modern elements inspired by the lamps Dolores Olmedo made of Bohemian glass for her home. Romero used flaked wax and tin and sugar skulls to create lights, which she sees as representing the light of living traditions that illuminate society. Fabric banners were reminiscent of pre-Hispanic codices like the Codex Borgia. Arrays of sugar skulls recall Mesoamerican skull racks or Tzompantli where the skulls of sacrifices were exhibited.

In 2015 Romero created an installation for the Day of the Dead at the British Museum. In the Great Court, she created an altar dedicated to the Unknown Immigrant. She drew upon folk traditions of paper and metal art, creating cantolla hot air balloons shaped like skulls out of tissue paper and tin calacas skeletons to float above the Great Court. Hanging paper banners printed on papel picado were placed in the Round Reading room, and marigold serpents wound their way up the stairs.

A ten-year retrospective including 103 pieces of her work, Betsabeé Romero: Lagrimas Negras (Black Tears) was curated by Julián Zugazagoitia and shown at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico (2007–2008). Versions of this exhibition have also appeared at Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (2010), and the Neuberger Museum of Art (2011).

Betsabeé Romero has participated in more than 20 biennials, including those of Cuba, Brazil, Monterrey, Cairo, and Vancouver, Canada. She has held more than 40 individual exhibitions in Mexico and other countries worldwide. Some of her earliest solo exhibitions were at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (El MACG) in Mexico City (1999), and Sous la grisaille de México, at Espace d'Art Yvonamor Palix in Paris, France (1999).

Betsabeé Romero (born 1963) is a Mexican visual artist. Her works include sculptures, installations, printmaking, perforated paper, photographs, and videos. She has exhibited widely, and has been featured in more than forty one-person exhibitions in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Betsabeé Romero was born in Mexico City in 1963. She earned her Bachelor of Arts (Licenciatura en Comunicación) at the Universidad Iberoamericana (1980–1984). She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Academia de San Carlos in 1986. She also studied at the Louvre and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After studying in France, she returned to Mexico to study pre-Hispanic and colonial art, earning a second master's degree in Art History from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1994.