About Treacherous Titties
The Hill Street County Club Gallery
530 S. Coast Highway Oceanside, CA 92054
Treacherous Titties was a solo show from artist and art therapists
Berenice Badillo PhD LMFT ATR-BC.
About Berenice :
Berenice is a Spanish speaking Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, illustrator, muralist, and multimedia artist. She is an immigrant from Mexico and has found herself straddling intertwined cultural and subcultural identities her entire life. She illustrated an award-winning book "Am I Blue or am I Green?" that explores the identity and impact of a boy's life with parents that are undocumented in the United States. Berenice strives to document and encourage the creation of communal cultural wealth through murals, sculpture, pop up art galleries and in the co-creation of counter stories. Berenice believes that there is an importance in representation and sees art expression as a means to both amplify the voices of BIPOC and disseminate the stories of their community where it can be witnessed on a grand scale.
Berenice is a Chicano Park muralist, has a doctorate in Art Therapy and is a (SEL) social emotional learning consultant. Berenice is the co-founder of XoQUE art in motion, an all women multi-media group determined to evoke change on how the U.S./Mexico border is portrayed and represented in the cultural imaginations. Badillo started her career as a community muralist mentoring homeless youth. She co-created a monthly hip hop event called ELEMENTAL that showcased the art of local youth at the Centro Cultural de la Raza, and developed after school programming that was recognized by the city of San Diego and the state of California. She was a MANA Honoree (Mexican-American Women's National Association) in recognition for “Outstanding Work and Dedication to the Community through Arts and Culture” and became a Community Fellow through The California Wellness Foundation Violence Prevention Initiative. Her work has appeared in many galleries and group shows including at the Havana Biennale, Insite 97 and the Tamaro Contemporary Art Exhibit in Tokyo, Japan. She has been a member of BAW/TAF and is a Breast Cancer Survivor.
The Solo Show
Exhibit write up:
Berenice Badillo was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 2023, right in the middle of the restoration of a 1997 historic mural in Chicano Park that she painted when she was a twenty-three-year-old. Chicano Park houses the largest collection of Chicano murals in the world. She was also a recipient of The Far South Border North grant and the Living Cultures grant. In the effort to not “waste her pain” as suggested by Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals (1980), Badillo created content that explored taboo subjects on her journey through Cancer. This included educational videos, a resource website, a poetry book that will be given to newly diagnosed patients, and artwork that will be showcased in her solo show “Treacherous Titties.” Badillo and her girl gang XoQue art in motion completed the sixty-five-foot mural, the largest mural in Chicano Park done by women, for women, about women. The Coronado bridge needed to be shut down for its completion and Badillo along with playwright Mabelle Reynoso created a short documentary of the process.
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