Monica S. Camin
Monica S. Camin is an Argentine-born artist based in New Jersey and Texas. Through her work she examines her roots as the daughter of German-Jews who escaped the worst years of the holocaust and found refuge in Argentina. The questions she explores in much of her work straddles the experiences of being brought up as the daughter of immigrants in Latin America and the experiences of personal immigration and identity in her adulthood as she emigrated to Israel and then the United States.
Within her artwork, Camin expresses her experience of cultural hybridity. Her paintings, sculptures, installations, and works on fabric record an attempt to reconnect to roots torn from their origins; they explore the space where the deeply personal overlaps with the collective experience; they emerge from the emotional labor of processing how to transform inherited trauma into productive participation.
Camin received formal training at the Paula A. Sarmiento Art Academy, Olivos, Argentina and Manuel Belgrano Art University, Bs. As., Argentina. Her education continued with sculpture courses taken with Sidney Simon at Arts Students League, NY, NY and at the New School, NY, NY where she studied under Chaim Gross.
Camin has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since the 70s, with solo exhibitions spanning New York City, New Jersey, Florida, and Buenos Aires. Her work is included in Collections at Center for Latino Culture, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Jewish Heritage Museum, Freehold, NJ; and various private collections nationally and abroad, including a 2019 commission of a large scale bronze for an outdoor space in Buenos Aires.
She has been awarded residencies at Camp Colton, Colton, OR (2017); Proyecto´acePIRAR, Buenos Aires (2015); and Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, MX (2000). In 2011, Camin completed a full-color 125 page bilingual memoir titled Mi niñez fue tan pintoresca/My childhood was so colorful.
