Featuring an opulent carriage drawn by carousel-style horses and loaded with 90’s nostalgia, artist Yvette Mayorga’s Magic Grasshopper is a 30-foot-long sculpture carrying critical narratives of migration, feminized labor, and colonial histories. Designed to metaphorically transport viewers across borders and historical eras, the pink-hued fantastical vessel is also a tribute to the physical and personal journeys undertaken in pursuit of the American Dream.
The sculpture is elaborately piped in Mayorga’s signature faux-frosting: thickened acrylic applied through pastry bags, which references the artist's familial labor of baking and the broader histories of women’s work and immigrant labor. The disarmingly sweet exterior and the color pink become a subversion, a sugary shield, and a portal to a hopeful future. The carriage itself looks prepared for a journey, with suitcases stacked on the roof, horses sporting Hello Kitty backpacks, and a smiley-face flag fluttering optimistically above. Tricked-out wheels with gold rims beneath the carriage serve as an homage to the lowrider culture rooted in Mexican-American communities of Chicago, where the artist is based. Wrapped around the carriage are painterly scenes of migration, layering European art historical tropes with personal and collective narratives.
Mayorga has coined the word “Latinxoco” to describe her distinctive style — taking inspiration from both Latinx and Rococo aesthetics, and the shared decadence of colonial Mexico and American culture. The carriage featured in Magic Grasshopper references the royal carriage of the Second Mexican Empire, which was modeled after the opulent coronation coach of Louis XVI at the Palace of Versailles, and was used at the Castillo de Chapultepec in Mexico City — a castle built atop sacred Aztec land. The title, Magic Grasshopper, refers to the English translation of the Nahuatl word Chapultepec (“hill of the grasshopper”), and evokes a mythical vehicle able to transcend the constraints of space and time.
Originally commissioned by Times Square Arts
This installation will be on view in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
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.
LEAD SUPPORT PROVIDED BY
THE ROBB AND MONIKA BALDWIN FAMILY FOUNDATION
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY
LIZ DIMMITT AND PIERS DAVIES
THE CITY OF ST. PETERSBURG
THE MARGARET ACHESON STUART SOCIETY
Featured Images:
Yvette Mayorga, Mexican-American Latinx, b. 1991, Magic Grasshopper (detail), 2025, Silicon piping, steel frame, polycarbonate resin, metal, casts, mechanical engineering, #D printed plastics, and marine grade plywood. Images courtesy of Times Square Arts. Photography by Michael Hull.
Photo of Yvette Mayorga by Marzena Abrahamik, 2025