Maru Lopez is an artist, educator, and emerging craft researcher. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico she is presently based in San Diego, CA.
Her practice is a process of exploration and a space of reflection about our connections to objects and the meaning we install in them. For the last decade, she has focused on jewelry, its intimate relationship with the body, and how this provides a powerful platform to process and share ideas. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Latin America and the United States including Jewellery is a Metamorphic view of the World in the Ilias Lalalounis Jewelry Museum in Greece, Manfred Bischoff: A Retrospective during Munich Jewellery Week 2015, Alchimia: An Anthology at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston Vinte e Tres: Joalharia Contemporanes na Ibero-America in Lisbon Portugal, II Bienal Latinoamericana de Joyeria Contemporanea in Argentina, Hot Dog: An Exhibition during SNAG 2019, Passengers in Munich Jewellery Week 2020, as well as Insurgencies: Women’s Art on the Border in the Era of the Cold War in The Front Gallery in San Diego and Objects D’ Art in Embajada Gallery in San Juan.
Alongside her artistic practice, Maru teaches jewelry workshops in San Diego. Her teaching experience began at Alchimia Jewellery School in Florence, Italy and she has taught workshops at San Diego Art Academy, YMCA Copley, and the Mingei Museum International. In recent years she has also worked as a museum educator at the Mingei International Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
She is currently researching Puerto Rico, its crafts, notions of Puerto Ricanness, fluid movements of its diaspora, and potentialities of re-imaginings .