Nina Diaz-Klein’s minimalist artworks are layered with meaning
Meet Nina Diaz-Klein, undergraduate student speaker for the UCLA Arts 2022 commencement
The human form often appears in Nina Diaz-Klein’s paintings or sculptures, though it takes a moment to recognize it. The fourth-year art student’s minimalist paintings explore gender and sexuality – and the expectations that come with them – through silhouettes of humans and, occasionally, plants and animals. There’s a subtle humor that connects her work, but also a searching for answers.
Diaz-Klein was born in Southfield, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit, and moved with her family to Thousand Oaks when she was two years old. She started making art at a young age, taking painting and drawing lessons in between ballet classes, before focusing her full attention on visual art.
After graduating high school, she took art classes at local community colleges while supporting herself as a freelance graphic designer. In the fall of 2020, she transferred to UCLA.
“The pandemic definitely was a bummer, to have to do that first year online,” she said. “But I understood that everyone had to go through it.”
Diaz-Klein is set to graduate this spring with a B.A. in art and will serve as the undergraduate student speaker at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture’s commencement ceremony on Saturday, June 11.
Nina Diaz-Klein and her scupture, Another Go. Photo by Gavin Aleshire/UCLA
In college, her painting and drawing style changed from more structured, classical figurative work to deconstructed, abstract shapes. Her choice of materials changed as well: from oil paints to acrylic and a staining technique. She’s also started incorporating collage elements into her canvases and make multimedia installations that explore similar themes.
Much of Diaz-Klein’s work references the female figure, often in an abstract way, though she says any gender could be mapped onto her work.
“It started out as self-representation – the idea of how women have been portrayed through the male gaze throughout history. And I find it to be interesting when people can represent their own body or their own image, regardless of gender,” she said.
Her paintings often use shades of blue and pink and peach, which also evoke gender expectations.
Reproduction and fertility are recurring themes in her work, from Nine, a painted silhouette of a pregnant woman, to Window of Opportunity, a sculptural installation of a raw egg preserved in vinegar and seen behind a window.
As a non-traditional student in her 30s, Diaz-Klein is seeing many friends around her age have children or decide to not have children, and feels that same pressure acutely.
“I haven't fully made a decision, so that's why I think it's on my mind or it's in the work,” she said.
Even as gender norms change, she said, women “still have to position ourselves in a world where we have these expectations and projections onto our bodies.”
Installation view of Klein's exhibition An Open Myth: reimagining gender and femininity at Space 776 New York in collaboration with Uncommon Beauty Gallery in 2021.
Some of her paintings can be interpreted on multiple levels. The forms of bodies are displayed in sexualized positions, and objects like a candle or a Venus fly trap are intentionally placed in suggestive locations.
“I kind of like to create symbols out of the body, to have a double read that is sort of ambiguous,” she said. Rather than view the female from the traditional male perspective, though, Diaz-Klein believes in empowering women through “taking agency of one's own image.”
Diaz-Klein was raised in a religious home, the middle child of seven kids. Her father is an evangelical pastor. That upbringing makes appearances in her art. There are paintings that reference the Garden of Eden and incorporate the symbols of the serpent and the apple.
“What I've been trying to do is question those stories that I've been told, or those mythologies, and how women have been interpreted or positioned in these stories. With these specific symbols like the snake, it’s a way of taking a negative symbol… and taking ownership of it,” she said.
Installation view of Klein's exhibition Somewhere In Between at the Broad Art Center's Little Gallery in 2021.
In 2014 she married Sergio Diaz, a Chilean American musician, and moved with him to Santiago, Chile for a year.
“It took me out of my bubble and away from my family and everything I knew,” she said. “That experience helped me develop my own independence and my own way of seeing gender. Just being removed from all the influences that I had growing up was really good.”
Around that time, she left the evangelical fold and started exploring themes of gender and sexuality in her work.
Even as an undergraduate, Diaz-Klein has seen widespread interest in her work, with pieces recently exhibited in Milan, Miami, San Francisco, and Santa Monica.
After graduating from UCLA, Diaz-Klein said she’ll apply to graduate schools to pursue an M.F.A., continue to experiment with painting and sculpture, and see where her art can take her.
Story by Avishay Artsy
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