Yvette Mayorga: Goddesses of the Great Hall is an immersive installation activates the museum’s historic 1965 entrance hall, serving as the first in a series of exhibitions to inaugurate The Great Hall Project, a brand-new curatorial initiative designed to engage the MFA’s spaces through contemporary art interventions.
Developed in direct dialogue with the museum’s 1799 painting Julie as Flora, Roman Goddess of Flowers by Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, Mayorga’s exhibition creates a striking conversation between historical ornamentation and contemporary explorations of femininity, excess, cultural memory, and power. Central to the presentation will be Mayorga’s own self-portrait inspired by Vigée-LeBrun, alongside major works generously on loan. These paintings serve as key anchors within the installation and exemplify Mayorga’s ongoing engagement with the visual language of eighteenth-century portraiture, creating a compelling visual and conceptual bridge between historical and contemporary representations of identity and self-fashioning.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yvette Mayorga is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work links feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging. Mayorga holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mayorga’s most recent solo museum exhibition, Dreaming of You, was at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2023-24. In 2023, Mayorga had her first major solo museum exhibition, What a Time to Be, at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; El Museo del Barrio,The Center for Craft, Asheville, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX; and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Mayorga’s large-scale installation, Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, is on view with the City of Chicago’s permanent public art collection at O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5.
Mayorga has been featured in Artforum, Artnet, Art in America, Art News, Cultured Magazine, DAZED, Galerie Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Hyperallergic, Latina Magazine, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vogue, W Magazine, and Women’s Wear Daily. Her works are in the permanent collections of 21c Museum Hotels, Cerámica Suro, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New Mexico State University Art Museum.
Website: https://www.yvettemayorga.com/
Featured Images:
Yvette Mayorga (American, b. 1991), Rhinestone Vaquero After Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2025, textile, rhinestones, buttons, belt buckle, gold flakes, silver flakes, glitter, and acrylic piping on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun (French, 1755-1842), Julie as Flora, Roman Goddess of Flowers, 1799, Oil on canvas, 50.9 x 38.5 inches
Yvette Mayorga (American, b. 1991), Self Portrait of the Artist After Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2025, textile, collage, stickers, gold flakes, silver flakes, pen, lace, buttons, acrylic nails, nail charms and acrylic piping on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
Photo of Yvette Mayorga by Marzena Abrahamik, 2025