Biography
Zoila Andrea Coc-Chang’s artistic practice emerges at the intersection of material intimacy and cultural entanglement. Drawing from her Chinese-Guatemalan heritage and Miami upbringing, she transforms organic remnants—corn husks, black beans, avocado pits—into sculptural weavings that thread together stories of migration, familial memory, and ancestral knowledge. These ephemeral ingredients, often collected from shared meals or everyday rituals, are combined with industrial materials like plastic wrappers or telephone wires, forming layered compositions that speak to the inseparability of nourishment and identity.
In Zoila’s work, food is never just sustenance—it is social marker, spiritual vessel, and political archive. Her use of decomposing produce, hand-dyed fabrics, and synthetic detritus highlights the uneven geographies of access and the domestic economies of care, especially within diasporic and marginalized communities. By integrating natural fibers with found packaging, she creates hybrid tapestries that oscillate between fragility and resistance—objects that never settle, but instead remain in flux, much like the communities they honor.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: ArtNexus Space (Miami, FL), WhiteBox (New York, NY), Jamestown Art Center (Jamestown, RI), XXIII Bienal de Arte Paiz Guatemala (GUA), The Arsenal at Central Park (New York, NY), Jeffrey Deitch (New York, NY), Lycoming College Art Gallery (Williamstown, PA), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA), the Pao Arts Center in Chinatown Boston (MA) and more.
Coc-Chang holds an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art and a BA in Studio Art and Education Studies from Brandeis University. She completed an apprenticeship at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery in Singapore and was an artist fellow at A.I.R Gallery in New York in 2022-23. Currently she is a Lecturer in Visual Arts at Brown University and Yale University.
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Exhibitions
