Salad Days

Milk Flower Plaque

By Mimi Pinheiro

Limited Series Plaster Bas-relief

11” x 6” x 1”

2025

Artist Statement: These sculptures are playful experiments meant to interrupt the normalization of homogenous, pre-fabricated architecture, goods and style. The environment and the objects that surround us are vital to our collective creativity and ability to employ a historically powerful tool for change, imagination. Depressing, soul-less objects and buildings will reflect upon those who inhabit them. Grey is the color to paint your house if you’d like to sell it faster.

Here’s to something slower. To some technique you learn about from a crackling old book in the Millicent Library, some laborious process or bygone technique you choose to dedicate yourself to even though you could have a plastic replica overnighted. Yours is a bit messy, but in the end filled with story, fingerprints – history in the making. Countless oppressive constructs have gotten us to a place of division and disconnect. Aesthetically speaking, this disconnect is also on the rise. 

Through humor and ornamentation I say Goodbye Grey, Hello Imagination. My works borrow from the traditions of decorative arts and architecture, reimagining fountains, mirrors, and bas-reliefs as playful studies in character and idiosyncrasy. I experiment with plaster of Paris, natural pigments, casting, and mold-making, while also pulling ornamentation from parallel fields—like cake decorating tips—or reviving motifs from wallpaper patterns and traditional symbolism. By working with both old-world and makeshift techniques, I keep alive the joy of ornament in a sea of standardized design.

Artist Bio: Mimi is an Azorean-American artist working across painting, performance, and sculpture. Her unusual family history—of whalers, volcanic displacement, ballroom dancers and growing up in an Azorean-American community—influences much of her work. Her practice involves reviving traditional techniques through humor; and favors immediacy, improvisation, and play. Mimi embarked on a two-year apprenticeship with Mexican painter José “Pepe” Barbosa of the collective Grupo Suma in Mexico City, after falling in love with a painting from one of his former students. She lived and worked in a borough of Mexico City for five influential years, surrounded by students of Gilberto Aceves Navarro and Grupo Suma.

Mimi continues her practice between New England and New Orleans, where she focuses on figure drawing, still life, and material-based experimentation. Many of her pigments are handmade using traditional techniques and ingredients such as eggs, honey, and minerals. Her most prevalent red is pigmented with Grana Cochinilla—a beetle that lives on the Nopal cactus and has been used since the 2nd century BCE for its prized crimson tone. She is also interested in decorative arts, folk arts, and traditional techniques. She dances the line between tradition and play- experimenting with materials from sugar to plaster. Her work is driven by absurdism, the grotesque, and elaborate parties. Mimi has exhibited in art fairs, galleries and museums from Berlin to Los Angeles to Mexico City.