as chair of the former from 2016 to 2019. Work and reception Critics situate Guerrero-Maciá's work at the intersection of painting, fiber, design and conceptual art traditions, noting its blurring of such boundaries and refusal of binaries such as "high" modernism or craft, formal severity or kitsch playfulness, geometric, hard-edged or biomorphic, pliable forms, the metaphysical or quotidian. She works in two- and three-dimensional media, with a long history of hybrid techniques including collage, assemblage, sewing and dyeing, sampling and appropriation inspired by the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Her hybrid paintings—encompassing hand-sewn textile and paper collages and reclaimed objects and clothing—employ a patchwork aesthetic in two ways: formally, using textiles like paint, as a vehicle for color, texture and depth; and as a method to sample styles, graphics, symbols of identity, histories and lived experiences. The resulting vocabulary engages themes involving visual and verbal language, the gendering of art genres, ethnicity and race, the body and social issues, often adopting historical iconography (e.g., medieval millefleur tapestries, 20th century radical movements such as Russian Suprematism, 1960s counterculture and punk rock) informed by contemporary social currents. West Coast critic DeWitt Cheng wrote that Diana Guerrero-Maciá wove together variegated cultural threads—revalidated decorative "women's art," text and word-based art, digital-age cross-pollination—into "samplers born of sampling, metaphors for wandering streams of consciousness, yet also satisfying artifacts." Earlier work In exhibitions at the MCA Chicago (2003), Artpace (2005) and Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery (2003, 2006), Guerrero-Maciá presented text-based, hand-sewn textile works and collages that reviews compared to ransom notes, commercial signage and the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Jenny Holzer. Made up largely of words with differently stitched, colored and shaped letter forms, they quoted films, songs and literature, newspaper headlines and colloquial speech—often statements involving love and war—in challenging arrangements that used odd word mash-ups or breaks to alter meanings. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner wrote that the fiber medium and its stitched technique created a "mildly startling" sense of strangeness unachievable in painting and at odds with the vaguely familiar sentiments being reproduced. In her show "Devoured by Symbols" (Tony Wight, 2008), Guerrero-Maciá recontextualized incongruous, familiar or banal mediated text and, increasingly, imagery in stitched, multi-textile works that playfully reworked painting conventions invoking the sublime: landscape, portrait, narrative, abstraction (e.g., The Tempest, Like a Rainbow). In the large-scale work, The Bigger Picture, she operated