MARÍA GABRIELA RAÍZ
Visual Artist • Curator of Intentional Spaces
Salvadoran + Filipina
Body. Land. Memory. Ancestry. Return.
About María
María Gabriela Raíz is a Salvadoran and Filipina curator of intentional spaces as well as a visual artist whose work explores the relationship between body, land, memory, ancestry, healing, and return.
Working primarily through painting and mixed media, María creates layered, emotionally textured work shaped by family, migration, nature, grief, joy, relationships, and the many ways identity changes over time.
Her practice has evolved alongside her own life.
Earlier work often centered survival, trauma, and the experiences of survivors. Those conversations remain part of her foundation, but her current work asks what exists beyond survival:
What do we inherit? What do we carry? What do we release? What brings us home to ourselves?
Color, abstraction, texture, and imperfect materials allow María to approach those questions without demanding simple answers. Her work moves between the deeply personal and the collective, creating space for memory, tenderness, contradiction, connection, and becoming.
For nearly a decade, María created publicly as GabyNobody. When it became time to move forward under a different name, she did not want to invent someone new.
María was already familiar.
For roughly a decade, it had been the alias she used throughout her crisis work—a name connected to years of holding space for people navigating some of the most difficult moments of their lives. It had quietly become part of her long before it became the name attached to her artwork.
The name also honors her grandmother, María Emma Ruiz de López, and the family lineage she carries with her.
Raíz — “root” — speaks to ancestry, memory, origin, and return.
Together, María Raíz honors the grandmother who came before her, the work that shaped a decade of her life, and the person she has continued get to know within her.
It is not a reinvention. It is a return.
The Work
María’s practice includes original paintings, mixed-media work, writing, installations, community experiences, and projects that invite others into reflection and storytelling.
Her survivor-centered work continues through projects such as The Rise & Thrive Experience, while her current body of work expands toward ancestry, land, family, memory, and the generations that came before—and may come after—her.
Currently
María is creating an entirely new body of original work for:
CUERPO, TIERRA, Y MEMORIA
April 15, 2027 • Frederick County, Maryland
An exploration of body, land, memory, ancestry, healing, and return.