Madre de Mi Corazón

Michelle Angela Ortiz constantly seeks to capture lost legacies, personal stories and silenced voices in her family and community.  Influenced by her Latin American and Caribbean cultures, her images are connected to stories of displacement, cultural barriers, immigration, and social economic inequalities.

The Pennsylvania Convention Center acquired Ortiz’s Llena de Luz y Lucha; Madre de Mi Corazón; El Niño Consentido.  Each of the three prints and their corresponding three sculptures tell one of the many immigration stories of her family.  All three images of Ortiz’s family members reflect struggle, conflict, nostalgia, and how immigration impacts the family dynamic.  Pictured here is Madre de Mi Corazón which is of Ortiz’s grandmother, Maria Dionisia, who constantly traveled back and forth between Colombia and the United States (Philadelphia). 

“Madre de Mi Corazón”
The pair of shoes represent the journey of Ortiz’s grandmother.  The shoes are placed with one forward and the other behind representing her traveling back and forth from Colombia to Philadelphia for over 35 years.  The poem carved in the forward shoe are the things that Ortiz remembers of her when she first came to live with her in the United States.  The second has her carved signature from her Colombian passport.