Alida Cervantes (b. 1972) is a Mexican artist who lives and works between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California. Her artwork is an exploration of power relationships. Her paintings, drawings, and mixed media work examine hierarchies, question dominant historical narratives, and create imagined spaces where sex, love, and emotions both flow and are repressed. As an inheritor of Mexico's colonial cultural discourse, her work draws from her own experiences of oppression and desire as a white upper class Mexican woman. Her daily commute across the Mexico/US border provides the springboard into her investigations of racial, gender, and class relationships and perceptions on both sides of the border. She uses fantasy, the grotesque, and dark humor in semi narrative, ambiguous works that implicate wider narratives of colonial and post-colonial representation.
Alida Cervantes studied at Florence's Scuola di Arte Lorenzo de' Medici in Italy and earned her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Charles Saatchi Collection, London, as well as the Jorge Perez collection in Miami.