At a crossroads, a Charlotte artist finds inspiration in love and her Puerto Rican roots

Artist Samantha Rosado didn’t know what to expect last year when she moved to Charlotte from Louisiana.

She came here with her girlfriend, who’s studying for her MBA. But aside from being near her loved one’s family, the 28-year-old Rosado didn’t have much tying her to the city.

A year later, she’s more grounded in the Queen City while finding herself at an artistic crossroads.

Her solid relationship, a studio at the McColl Center and a teaching job at Central Piedmont Community College have led Rosado to a new stage as an artist.

Rosado always has focused her art on her own experience.

As a gay woman whose family hails from Puerto Rico, she often paints herself in the same vivacious shapes she uses for portraits of her family, fiancee and pets. Her canvases celebrate the comfort of days spent sprawled in the living room, and the joy of multigenerational family reunions.

But now, she’s been rethinking that.

‘Not mine to tell’

Rosado said she always knew she wanted to be an artist, and her family hasn’t objected to her depictions of them through the years.

She’s developed caricatures of each of them, emphasizing the differences in each member’s smile or taking care to portray them in familiar palettes. Layers of bold paint make their features leap off the canvas toward the viewer.

They’re joyful scenes, often with loved ones hugging each other and laughing together. But she wants love to be apparent even in her more somber scenes.

Last year, she entitled her Louisiana State University MFA thesis project “Si tiene su 401(k), it’s OK to be gay!”

Her father inspired the joke. He and other family members have been supportive of Rosado and her sister since the siblings came out as queer, Rosado said. But there’s still an extra layer of newness to navigate as a Hispanic lesbian, even with accepting family.

It’d be dishonest to hide that, Rosado said. But she never wants her loved ones — be that family, Puerto Ricans or the queer community — to come under judgment as a result of her work.

So while she’s still drawing from her own life and portraying her relationships with the people in it, she’s tried to limit herself to the aspects of her loved ones that she’s directly witnessed.

“It’s just not really mine to tell, I’m starting to think,” Rosado said. “And there’s so much of my own that I can talk about instead.”

A new direction

Take her latest project, on display at C3 Lab, a South End gallery space.

Two barstools, borrowed from the restaurant adjoining the gallery, offer perches for visitors to sit in front of five plates piled with papier-mâché delicacies.

Rosado crafted them at her latest residency, a month-long spring stint at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. She arrived at the mountain property with few specific goals, but knew she wanted to tackle the fraught relationship between food and body image.

Anderson’s tricked-out woodshop made carpentry the obvious choice, she said, and other artists helped her with new techniques.

So she carved wood panels into imitations of the countertops she ate off of with her family, piling her papier-mâché treats onto blue plates and hovering paintings of food on wood panels above each one.

The plates feature celebratory Puerto Rican staples from her childhood: flan, tostones, empanadas and sweet pastries.

Floated above each of them, as if to inspire a snacker’s daydream, are wooden panels painted with more foods: bagel bites, king cake, macaroni and cheese, and a sprinkles-laden donut.

They’re American staples, but Rosado noted that each of them originated in other nations’ cuisines. The U.S. versions, painted in feathery brush strokes of saturated oils, hearken to specific brands.

Like most of Rosado’s recent work, the colonialism themes come through a prism of her personal experiences: growing up on the mainland, visiting family in Puerto Rico, going to school in Louisiana. And while food itself is a new artistic focus for her, she’s often centered self-portrait projects on her body image.

Sometimes diet culture seeps its way into her thoughts, but she tries to avoid that.

“There’s a lot of memories behind them,” Rosado said. “But... whether or not they’re guilt-inducing, they’re all foods we celebrate with. We come together and have a community around (them).”

Growing into life in Charlotte

Rosado hasn’t noticed much change to her style — bold texture, colorful blocks and collage-like layouts — since moving to North Carolina. Her work has kept her indoors more than she’d like.

But even without details explicitly tied to Charlotte, she’s noticed the tones of her work change.

She’s spent more time with her girlfriend’s young cousins, she said, whose playfulness leads her to a palette of vivacious pastels. Serene shades of brown mix with pale whites and yellows to depict her fiancee. But the city itself hasn’t crept into her work just yet.

Still, Charlotte marks a place where Rosado’s art has filtered back into her own life.

Last year, girlfriend Destiny Kasubaski rented out the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art for an intricate surprise proposal. She knelt down in front of a Tryon Street background and proposed with a ring that included carvings of the flowers Rosado often incorporates into her paintings.

The pair are seeking queer-friendly vendors for their upcoming wedding, determined to support artists within their own community.

Even the pieces Rosado has made for Charlotte art shows will take on new life in their shared home, she hopes. Portions of woodwork she did for the C3 show will become furniture for their cat, Mowgli.

While jobs and family will dictate whether the couple stays in Charlotte long-term, Rosado said she hopes to keep digging into the city.

Between her teaching job and an upcoming mural gig for the Hidden Valley community center, her art has started spreading beyond the walls of her McColl studio, where she’s renewed her lease.

By the end of the next lease, Rosado expects she’ll have had time to let the city seep into her art — even if she’s reconsidering how she depicts the people in her life, the places that raised them have a way of shining through.

More arts coverage

Want to see more stories like this? Sign up here for our free “Inside Charlotte Arts” newsletter: charlotteobserver.com/newsletters. You can also join our Facebook group, “Inside Charlotte Arts,” by going here: facebook.com/groups/insidecharlottearts.