Leticia Bajuyo has a passion for not just creating art, but also sculpting young minds with an impressive career as a college professor. We sat down with Bajuyo to discuss her career and what drives her to construct incredible sculptures like the one currently on display at Oklahoma Contemporary.
Lavinia Creswa: Have you always been an artist?
Leticia Bajuyo: I have been an object maker for as long as I can recall. My siblings and I would play outside and spend hours working together building things—and thankfully survived some of our creations. My mother painted, so there were always art supplies around. It wasn’t until high school when I had an amazing art teacher, Mr. Rhodes, who helped me realize that I enjoyed the process of making and designing.
LC: Did you study art after high school?
LB: Yes, I went to University of Notre Dame for undergrad and originally planned to earn a degree in painting. I found I had a hard time communicating through my paintings without a specific prompt. My favorite part of painting was constructing the canvases; building the boxes, stretching the canvas and sanding them down. I had a stack of canvases with no painting on them. My senior year, I took a sculpture class and was shown work by artists like Anne Hamilton and Félix González-Torres, and thought to myself, “That counts? Instead of drawing a still life and saying what the piece means, through the object I can just show the audience?” I went on to get my MFA in sculpture from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, after my mentor, Dennis Peacock, saw my senior thesis sculpture exhibition and recruited me to be his student.
LC: When did you start teaching?
LB: I started as a teaching assistant while getting my master’s and then after graduation began teaching at a small liberal arts school in Indiana called Hanover College. From there, I have taught at Notre Dame and Texas A&M Corpus Christi, and I have been at OU since 2022. Oklahoma feels familiar to where I grew up in southern Illinois. Moving here felt like coming home.
LC: What inspires your sculptures?
LB: I’m drawn to materials that once held value but have since been discarded, objects that once mattered to someone. I have a soft spot for things that have been left behind, empathy for objects that were at one point important but now for one reason or another, whether sociologically or economically, society has moved passed them. It parallels ideas of immigration and migration, economic structures and value systems. The future rarely asks for our preferences, and how others respond and change is beyond our control. The CD, for me, is like that. In our lifetime, we have seen discs go from coveted technology to essentially trash. I have been giving them a new purpose and creating art with them since 2009.
LC: What do you hope people feel when viewing your work?
LB: I hope they feel wonder. So much of our world can dull that feeling, but art can inspire and re-inspire curiosity. You might start to wonder about where all these CDs came from. You may start to search for CDs that you did or didn’t have. Think, “Oh, funny, someone’s wedding album is here next to an AOL CD.” It’s participating in the story and feeling a sense of joy and awe. A sense of discovery inspires me, and I’m grateful to the team at Oklahoma Contemporary for the opportunity to share it.
