Today we’d like to introduce you to Angélica Omaña.
Hi Angélica, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in a public hospital and, in a way, I never really left it.
My parents dedicated practically their entire lives to a public health institution in Mexico. My dad was a nurse and my mom worked in administration for nearly 30 years. Thanks to them, I grew up playing and running through the hallways, offices, and gardens of clinics and hospitals, long before I understood what those spaces really meant.
At 20, I started working as part of the cleaning staff in the same institution where my parents had worked. A few years later, I was about to study Medicine, but my partner encouraged me to pursue what I had always wanted to do: study Art. That’s how I enrolled in the Bachelor of Plastic Arts at UABC in 2016. I went in thinking I would dedicate myself solely to painting portraits and landscapes, until I realized that my true source of inspiration was right where I was born, raised, and worked.
My job cleaning the hospital allowed me to finish my degree and sustain my artistic practice. At the same time, art taught me to look at that environment with different eyes. Work hours turned into curious eyes and a creative mind; I began to re-signify everything around me and give it new meaning. There were never two separate lives: one has always nourished the other.
Three years ago I decided to become a mom, and Ezequiel arrived—my wonderful and restless son, who has profoundly transformed my way of seeing life and making art.
Years later, my relationship with the hospital changed again when, in 2025, I was diagnosed with cancer. That experience transfigured how I understand my own work and has given rise to a new stage in my artistic practice, where I continue exploring memory, care, and the hospital experience from a much more intimate place.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
One of the first challenges came when I started my degree in 2016. I studied in the mornings and worked in the afternoons as cleaning staff at a clinic, with a small salary. Honestly, I don’t know where I got the time or energy to do it all. Almost all the money I earned ended up turned into materials for school or for producing artwork.
The truth is, I was never completely alone. At one point my boss supported me immensely and several nurses practically adopted me as a daughter: they brought me lunch every afternoon and celebrated every small achievement with me. When I had my first exhibitions and even when I started organizing exhibition projects, they donated part of the first appetizers for the events. They were always there to support me, shaping my way of understanding the community.
In 2020, a challenge arrived that changed us all: the COVID-19 pandemic. The fear of working in a hospital was enormous. I am aware that I didn’t happen to be on the front lines of care, but being on that second line was also scary, especially at first. The shortage of protective equipment caused many colleagues to come up with impressive ingenuity to solve what seemed impossible: masks made of acetate sheets, garbage bags used as disposable gowns. Despite the circumstances, I have always been inspired by Mexican creativity to resolve even the most difficult moments. It is resourceful, incredible, and sometimes even fun.
Over time, conditions improved, as did our knowledge of the virus. Meanwhile, the part of me that cleaned kept working, but the part of me that was an artist couldn’t figure out how to process everything I was living through. Between 2020 and 2021, directors at one of the clinics asked me to make a couple of paintings to pay tribute to the medical staff. Today those works are part of the institution and hundreds of people see them every day. Although I don’t paint as much as before, it still excites me to know that many friends recognize themselves in them and that many others feel represented.
Becoming a mom has also been one of the biggest challenges and, at the same time, one of the greatest gifts of my life. I am convinced it made me a better person and artist. Like many women, at first I felt like I no longer belonged to myself, but to that new being who depended completely on me. Little by little, you find yourself again. Even so, it remains a constant challenge. Often I look for other artists who are also moms to ask them how they do it, what works for them, or simply to share our experiences. Those conversations always end up giving me the strength to keep going.
And then… cancer. I think nothing can be as blunt as that. In September 2025 I was diagnosed with stage IIIC1 cervical cancer. You feel good, you look good, but the doctor’s monitor and the tests say something else. Shame, guilt, and that spiral of “what ifs” appear… but the “what ifs” don’t exist. Beyond what it meant medically, to me it sounded like a sentence and felt as if the world had stopped.
Little by little I shared the diagnosis with my friends, my family, and my community. Every time I did, the fear weighed less and the love weighed more. Without realizing it, I distributed among them the weight that I could no longer carry alone… I just missed distributing a bit of nausea and neutropenia to them.
I sold collages and, thanks to friends, family, and people from Tijuana’s artistic community, I was able to pay for tests and treatments that weren’t available in the public system. When that money ran out, without me asking and without expecting it, my closest friends and artists, along with Ángulo Galería, organized an auction to support me. Many people have held and cared for me. Very close people and others I barely knew wrote to me to say: “whatever you need.” Sometimes that simple phrase is everything, even if you never end up asking for anything. I feel an immense gratitude for every person who was with me.
I went through months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Sometimes I say that all those medical interventions were small rehearsals for dying… in the hope of living longer. I finished treatment and in June I received the news I had longed for: I am cancer-free and in remission. Now come five years of taking great care of and loving my body so that it doesn’t return.
They were months that at the time seemed eternal and today feel like an abstract nightmare. Throughout all that time I was also sustained by ideas (not very clear ones) and the desire to create. I keep trying to understand what my body experienced. I don’t know if I’ll ever find all the answers, but through my work I keep searching for them and connecting with those who have gone through similar things. Maybe that’s where the answer I’m most interested in finding lies.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I always thought the hospital was simply the place where I worked. Over time I understood it was also the place from which I was learning to look at the world.
I am interested in exploring the stories that inhabit everyday objects, especially those related to illness, because I believe they hold much more than a function: they also contain memory, affections, bureaucracy, care, and life experiences.
One of the ways I explore these questions is by working with medicine boxes, medical documents, and materials I find in my daily environment, which I transform through collage and assemblage. Recently I am also exploring textiles and video performance.
Observe, sweep, memorize, classify, carve, imagine, disinfect, archive, clean the bathroom, discard, wait, dust, wash, create, and repeat.
Many of those actions are part of my daily work. From that place of knowing and unknowing, as a woman who cleans, I work from play, experimentation, and repetition, creating methodologies that dialogue with the cycles of hospital work and, more recently, with the cycles of treatment and recovery.
My work often consists of changing things’ places: what is normally considered insignificant can become raw material for creating; what usually goes unnoticed becomes the protagonist.
This appears in projects like PICTOPHARMA: 205 Days of Experimental Therapy, a series of collages made with medicine boxes over more than twenty-nine weeks, and Clinical Un-archive: The Resistance of What Was Not Thrown Away, where I work with medical documents, personal archives, and sound recordings to reflect on memory, the body, care, and illness.
The precarious, the ephemeral, and the incomplete appeared in my work involuntarily. Today I consciously embrace them as a condition and also as an aesthetic. I do not seek to offer definitive answers; I am interested in opening conversations about fragility, hope, care, and dignity, leaving space for each person to find their own questions.
I consider that the way my different life experiences intersect with art is what distinguishes my work. I have known the hospital from various places: I was born in one, grew up playing in its hallways, have worked for over a decade as cleaning staff, experienced my pregnancy within the public health system, and years later, became an oncology patient.
The hospital changes in each of those experiences. It looks different, it smells different, and waiting is different. All those ways of inhabiting it have run through, consciously and unconsciously, my artistic practice and the way I understand care, illness, work, and memory.
Countless people have grown up or worked in hospitals. What transformed my way of inhabiting that space was art. It turned me into a curious observer; jokingly, I’d say almost nosy. I started noticing things that previously seemed insignificant: the aesthetics of spaces, objects, gestures, routines, waiting times, archives, conversations, and everything that normally goes unnoticed or is discarded.
More than an exhibition or recognition, I feel deeply proud of the community I am part of.
I am fortunate to be surrounded by good friends, a family that loves me, colleagues with whom I can share ideas, doubts, and processes, and people with whom I can be openly vulnerable. Sharing knowledge and feelings has been one of the most valuable experiences of my life.
It is something that has taken years to build and that I want to continue nurturing. In the end, I believe artworks are important, but the people who walk with you during that process are even more so.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
If I have learned anything along this path, it is that knowledge and friendship can come from diverse places. During college, a phrase was born that still accompanies me: “My teachers became my friends and my friends became my teachers.” I faithfully believe in this and try to apply it every day.
Motherhood has taught me to be more disciplined, to better organize my time, and at the same time, to observe the world with a curiosity similar to my son’s. It has reminded me that it is always worth looking at things from another place and with fresh eyes.
Illness, on the other hand, taught me much more than I could have imagined. I discovered that my greatest strength is vulnerability. The fear I carried for much of my life has been transforming, and today I feel I have new tools to face whatever comes. Furthermore, I understood that I was never alone, that there was an immense amount of love surrounding me, and that for me, the most important things in life are love, friendship, and care.
Art has given me its own lessons. It taught me that a mistake is not always something to correct; sometimes it is what makes us unique. I learned to make mistakes with less judgment and much more curiosity. I discovered that art can be a way to understand, accompany, and transform both the darkest and the most luminous moments of our lives.
Throughout my practice I continue searching for new languages to turn difficult experiences into projects that generate dialogue about care, illness, and memory. And, although I work with topics that can be very harsh, in my work and in my life I try not to take everything too seriously. If I can play or make a joke about my own tragedies, I do it. For me, humor is also a form of resistance.
I love life as much as I love creating and playing with ideas. I hope to be able to keep doing both for a long time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://angelicaomana.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/angelicaomana_
