Traditional Mexican food and flavors are a source of joy and love for b chehayeb and were abundant at family gatherings and celebrations of all sizes. Lacking a passion for cooking, chehayeb’s food-related memory paintings evoke strong familial ties, clashes of cultures, and the pleasures of eating your favorite foods.

The gestural forms in b chehayeb’s new cycle of semi-abstract paintings emerge as the artist sifts through memories, focusing on a period of adolescence subsumed by the complexities of girlhood. Nearly recognizable objects plucked from chehayeb’s childhood landscape in small-town Texas—cowboy hats and boots, horses and horseshoes, snakes and ladders, candles, notebook paper, traditional Mexican cuisine—materialize across each surface and anchor non-linear narratives into amorphic spaces. This index of recurring symbols guides the artist as she navigates sensory experiences and emotions, while reconstructing scenes within a malleable painted ether—“painting as failed poetry,” chehayeb notes. A voracious reader with a strong affinity for language, chehayeb began to write at a young age and earned degrees in both poetry and painting, explaining that it was “the fracture in my writing practice that led to visual experimentation and painting.” Fostering an autobiographical constellation, chehayeb named this body of work tomboy tejano blues with tomboy and Tejano—a Spanglish portmanteau of Texan and Mexican also referred to as Tex-Mex—as self-identifications and “blues” as an expression of the emotional nature of growing up (though the musical genre known as the blues also has roots in Texas). The paintings within chehayeb’s tomboy tejano blues introduce several new symbols to her expanding lexicon: stars, softballs, trophies, and chones. The lone star of the Texan flag has morphed into an all-seeing nonbinary entity tumbling through memories, with the five points representing limbs and a head—chehayeb and her stars find bodily autonomy and individuality, even in a land rife with gendered binaries. In alignment, softball became a haven from enforced femininity, where chehayeb was rewarded—with trophies—for embracing less conventional qualities like physical strength and power. Chones—a nonbinary Spanish word for underwear—float through paintings, often decorated with red flowers. chehayeb has embraced chones as a symbol of hyperfeminity that gives form to the awkwardness and disconnection she felt as she encountered traditional girlhood. Working in concert, chones, stars, softballs, trophies, and the other symbols of tomboy tejano blues provide insight into the fluidity of selfhood while offering solace and inspiration to anyone who finds themselves belonging, however only in pieces, to a multiplex of languages and cultures and identities.