Dominique Muñoz Expands Photography into Sculpture and Basketry at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft Residency

Key facts

• Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan American visual artist working across photography, sculpture, printmaking, weaving, and performance.
• He completed a Craft and Photography Residency at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC).
• During the residency, he expanded photography into sculptural forms with cyanotype printing and basketry weaving.
• His compositions incorporate vibrant geometric fragments from traditional Guatemalan textiles.
• His grandmother gave him a blanket when he left for college, sparking his interest in textiles.
• He photographed blankets brought by his grandmother and great-grandmother when they migrated from Guatemala to D.C. in the 1970s.
• In May, he purchased new textiles in Guatemala for his mother’s birthday, focusing on contemporary motifs.
• A mentor from graduate school gave him a thrift-store blanket with quetzal birds and a row of white, blonde, blue-eyed figures, which he photographed, cut up, and rewove.
• His process includes photographing textiles, cutting them into strips, weaving them, and creating twelve-by-twelve-inch pattern samples that he scans and digitally alters.
• This summer, he is printing on transparency sheets and exposing them over cyanotype-soaked bedsheets to sunlight for twenty-four hours.
• He has soaked basket reeds in cyanotype solutions and acquired three large panels of glass with crimped edges for vertical cyanotype works.
• He aims to host workshops to create a community archive of textures and patterns from childhood or migration blankets.