At Casa de Artesanos, every brushstroke is an act of remembrance. Every color on the skin is a song of love, resistance, and belonging. This Mother’s Day, we honor not only the mothers who nurture, protect, and care, but also those who pass on their art, their struggles, and their stories to new generations.
At Casa de Artesanos, every brushstroke is an act of remembrance. Every color on the skin is a song of love, resistance, and belonging. This Mother’s Day, we honor not only the mothers who nurture, protect, and care, but also those who pass on their art, their struggles, and their stories to new generations.
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We come from a home where, from a young age, we learned that creating was an act of survival. Our mother, a Colombian woman, taught us that creativity was not a privilege—it was a vital tool in the face of poverty, discrimination, and adversity. In our house, hands were always busy: painting, sewing, planting, mending, caring. Life was woven through colors, herbs,
needles, and brushes; through artisanal practices that still live on in our hands today.
Our grandmother, an herbalist from Santa Librada, Bogotá, healed us for years with her plants. She taught us the quiet power of botany, the wisdom of weaving as memory, the importance of community service, and, above all, the profound respect for Mother Earth. She was the firm root that held the Páez women together—roots we still carry in our hearts as we continue walking her path.
In this artistic project, three generations came together: a Colombian mother, her Colombian daughter, her eldest Colombian son, and her youngest son, a Colombian-American-Portuguese boy. Together we painted, shared stories, and allowed maternal hands to once again guide, paint, and shelter. Every mark on the skin was also a mark on our family history, on the struggles we have carried, on the deep yearning to never forget who we are and where we come from.
Keeping our artisanal culture close has been central to our healing process. The practices we inherited—embroidery, painting, planting, herbal care—are not only ways to preserve our identity; they have been tools for healing, spaces for gathering, ways to name what hurts and transform trauma into creation. Art has allowed us to tell our own stories, to build collective memory, and to transform pain into beauty. Every object we create, every painted body, is testimony that we are still here: alive, resilient, connected.
And in the midst of this tribute, we weave a profound connection with the mothers of Palestine. We are united by the resonance of grief, the absences carried across generations, the wounds borne by women who are displaced, migrant, surviving. We too have lost sons, daughters, mothers, cousins, aunts, grandmothers—lost to violence, poverty, discrimination, lack of access to medical care. While our pain is not the same as that endured by Palestinian mothers, we
embrace their struggle, we accompany their sorrow, we honor their lands and their right to life.
We see ourselves reflected in their resistance against a patriarchal system that oppresses us, that seeks to strip us not only of territory, but of voice, history, and dignity.
This Mother’s Day, we honor all possible forms of motherhood—but especially our own: the Páez women of Santa Librada, Bogotá, Colombia. We honor their knowledge, their strength, their courage to raise children amid adversity. We honor their ability to turn wounds into medicine, silences into songs, absences into deep roots.
Here, art is inheritance, memory, and love. Here, mothers are also artists. Here, tenderness is a form of resistance.
And with every brushstroke a mother leaves on her daughter’s skin, she is drawing a map toward a world that is more just, more humane, more free.
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Dedicated with eternal love and deepest gratitude to Aurora Páez and Gladys Páez, the most courageous and wise women, who with their strength, their art, and their tenderness guided us here. May their legacy continue to bloom within each of us.