Amy Cordova sees her work and her life as inseparable. She is a visual artist, writer, and educator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Amy has been creating art for as long as she can remember and finds the combination of art and nature to be transforming. She sees hope in children and her work calls on adults to wake up to the wonder, beauty, and potential that she believes young people embrace intuitively.
“When I write I want to make pictures with my words and when I paint I want to tell a story.”
There’s enough sorrow and sadness in the world. I choose for my own work to be uplifting because that makes people feel some kind of a connection. That’s the goal of what I do because at the base of it all, it’s just love, and respect. That’s what everyone wants. I find that my strength comes from the earth. That’s where I find solace and strength and feelings of belonging.
Personal peace, I believe, is in the moments when we feel connected, protected, and satisfied, and there’s nothing lacking. Personal peace is where we have to start, and maybe it will never get beyond that in the world. I’m sorry to tell you, but I don’t know if peace could ever be attainable in the world, because there are so many different perspectives and there are so many agendas that want to dominate or profit from others. I can try to have a good heart and be open to people. There’s a calmness in being centered within myself and how I walk in the world.
Amy Cordova short audio clip
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Discussion Questions
- Where have you found your sense of belonging?
- What is the value of art in expressing yourself? What art form is the easiest for you to identify with? Do you consider yourself an artist? What is your definition of an artist?
- Where does your strength come from? What drains your strength?
- What is your biggest dream? Do you think you’ll ever accomplish that dream?
- If you needed to tell a story, how would you tell it? What visuals would you use? What music would you use?
- What is a powerful story that you’ve heard recently? What made it powerful?
Hi, Amy. We bought a huge chalk work from you in the mid-90s. At that time, we had a great place to hang it in our house outside Portland OR. Unfortunately, when we moved to western NC, wall space was minimum, so we wound up loaning it to a Mexican restaurant in Asheville NC, with the understanding that we would come get it when/if we had wall space for it ever again. I just wanted to let you know that your beautiful work of art “The Gift” is no more. It was destroyed in the Biltmore Village flooding in Asheville during Hurricane Helene. NOW we do have a place for it, but we didn’t get it out of Asheville in time.
I am so sorry that the moving, beautiful work has been destroyed and that you will not have it back again. May the beautiful story it represented to you continue on in your hearts, and may the beautiful story of the gift continue in my heart too.