From a young age, Natividad Amador spent hours in workshops of Juchitán’s traditional weavers, playing with small fabric fragments on which she would embroider and paint. During the 1980s N. Amador participated in the visual and graphic arts workshops at the Casa de la Cultura de Juchitán – Lidxi Guendabiaani’, a facility founded by painter Francisco Toledo (1940-2019) that became a model for other cultural facilities in Mexico. With the help of her peers in Juchitán, N. Amador became the first woman visual artist from her community.

She began her university studies in visual arts at the School of Visual Arts of the Benito Juárez Autonomous University in Oaxaca. She then participated in several collective exhibitions in Mexico City, before returning to her community where she worked with weaving and embroidery techniques notably by hand, with a crochet hook and a table frame. These artistic forms synthesise ancestral techniques with contemporary practices, creating a historical and aesthetic simultaneity with which the artist succeeds in creating timeless embroidered canvases.

For her Pinthila (2010) exhibition, N. Amador presented herself as a disciple of twelve great masters of the Mexican visual arts scene by freely translating and interpreting – with her embroidery – a work of art from each of these great artists. She created a dialogue by collaborating directly with artists like Gabriel Macotela (b. 1954) or by freely interpreting a sketch, as with Demián Flores (b. 1971), creating a fascinating exhibition representative of Mexican textile art of the first decade of the new millennium.

In her more recent work, N. Amador weaved veritable cartographies and maps. Her embroidered canvases were stitched with infinite patience, becoming like windows that provide a look into the traditional art of Juchitán. Stitch by stitch, the artist sought to slow down time in an era that seems to lead nowhere, revealing meaning to life to modern humanity. N. Amador’s working process is slow and methodical, taking time for remembrance. In other words, N. Amador stitches through the heart twice, performing both a weaver’s task and recalling the actions of pre-Columbian female shamans who operated on open hearts. In this way, N. Amador’s works act as a mirror, evoking both the ancient pre-Columbian craft of timekeeping and the ancient Binnizá (Zapotec of the Oaxacan Isthmus) system of survival and reciprocity among the women of Juchitán, Oaxaca.