The Guatemalan printmaker who leaves an impression — on plantain leaves

Inside the MassArt studio of Master of Fine Arts candidate Magda Leon

Magda Leon photographed in her studio at Massachusetts College of Art and Design surrounded by some of her work. She is a printmaker who prints on banana leaves and is sewing a quilt with them.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Printmaker Magda Leon’s art is one part hard work, one part bridging cultures as a Guatemalan immigrant, and one part spiritual necessity.

“I’ve been fulfilled as a mom, as a wife, as a daughter, in many other ways,” said Leon, a mother of four and former social worker. Art is different. “This,” she said, “is mine.”

She’s a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, with work in the 2024 thesis show now at MASSART x SoWa. We visited her studio at MassArt.

Prints on leaves hang from the ceiling of Magda Leon's MassArt studio. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Where to find her: www.instagram.com/magdaleonarte/

Age: 46

Making a living: “It gives me life,” Leon said.

She would like to teach. When she returned to school at 39 to get a bachelor’s degree in art at Rhode Island College, she said, “I loved all my professors, but I felt like nobody was representing me. I would tell my husband, ‘I wish there were more women. I wish there were more Latinos teaching.’”

Originally from: Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Lives in: Providence

Magda Leon displays an immigration game she made. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Studio: Leon’s woodcuts fill the walls. Cardboard plates for collagraphs (prints made by collaging materials on a substrate) and banana and plantain leaves rest on a Guatemalan blanket on the floor. An immigration game the artist made sits on a table. Evidence of her family is everywhere: Hats worn by patriarchs. Her grandmother’s grocery list.

How she started: Leon’s family immigrated to Providence when she was 9. “My parents never learned how to speak English. As a kid, I was translating for them. I was translating for the neighbors. That meant going to the emergency room, going to the DMV. I had access to adult life. Art was an escape from it.”

What she makes: Guatemalan tamales are cooked with banana or plantain leaves; the thesis show features Leon’s quilt made of leaves screenprinted with Indigenous Guatemalan patterns in as many as eight colorful layers. Before she printed them, she waved them over a smoky fire to make them more pliant.

Magda Leon, "Tamalada." Plantain and banana leaves, ink, and thread.Magda Leon

“It’s called ‘Tamalada,’ which is a gathering where you eat tamales. It talks about how we all come from different backgrounds, but we have this common struggle as immigrants of leaving home and trying to make a life again. I printed all these leaves, brought them to the studio.”

Then she invited students and professors in. “I brought tamales to eat, and we did a little ceremony,” Leon said.

How she works: “It’s laborious. That personal moment of just sweating — it’s very private, very genuine. That’s where, for me, the art is. The outcome is the cherry on top.”

A shopping list that belonged to Magda Leon's grandmother. "I figured out she made fresh queso fresco, fresh cheese. She asked for two gallons of milk," Leon said. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Advice for artists: “You have to hear counsel and guidance. But at the end of the day, make your own decisions. Stay true to what’s inside and go for it even if people don’t take notice. When somebody doesn’t get it, that’s part of the package of the tamale.”

2024 MFA THESIS

At MASSART x SoWa, 460 Harrison Ave. through May 26. https://sowa.massart.edu/