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Carolyn Castaño (born 1971 in Los Angeles, CA), is an American visual artist. She creates portraits utilizing painting and collage. She has worked in the genre of arte paño, a type of prison art involving portraits of family members and friends drawn in ball-point pen on napkins or handkerchiefs. Saldamando also works in video, installation and performance art.

Her work was included in the group exhibition "Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter" at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in 2011, Her work was also shown in "We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles," curated by Elizabeta Betinski as an official collateral exhibition of the The 56th Venice Biennale. She was a resident artist at the Art Omi International Artist Colony in 2002.

Biography
Saldamando was born to parents of Mexican-American and Japanese-American descent. She was raised in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Education

 * MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.
 * Skowhegan, School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine, 1996.
 * BA, University of California, Los Angeles School of Arts and Architecture, 2000

Quotes
"A lot of what I try to capture are different subcultures or scenes in which people have created their own world outside of larger alienating constructs."

"My friends and I would buy Teen Angels, a magazine of lowrider and cholo art, and try to copy the drawings of Aztec pyramids and warriors and naked girls. I think that's how I got good at ballpoint pen renderings."

"Growing up in the Mission district in San Francisco, it was predominantly a hip-hop culture. Here in Los Angeles, I'd go to shows or house parties, and it would be all Latino kids listening to the Cure and the Smiths. In L.A., I felt normal for the first time."

Exhibitions

 * "When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando." Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, Los Angeles, CA. September 10 - December 7, 2013.
 * "There is a Place..." Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA. January 2 - January, 30 2010.
 * "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement." Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 6, 2008–September 1, 2008.
 * "Re-Do China" Ethan Cohen Gallery, 2003.