For artist and Heart of Los Angeles staff member Melissa Govea, art is both a form of personal expression and a powerful tool for community connection. Fellow Heart of LA staff member Marina Santana sat down with Melissa to discuss the experiences that shape her creative practice, the artists who inspire her, and why making art accessible to communities matters.
Melissa’s practice unfolds as a visual poetics of survival, where sign painting, muralism, and printmaking operate not merely as mediums but as insurgent languages. Rooted in South Central Los Angeles and shaped by her Purépecha lineage, Govea’s work navigates the tensions of the contemporary Native diaspora through an iconographic vocabulary that merges mythic resonance with urban vernacular. Her compositions, often bold, declarative, and textually driven, recall the aesthetics of public signage while subverting their commercial origins, transforming them into vessels of cultural memory and political address. In works such as Migration is Natural (2022), Govea articulates a critique of colonial borders and migrant criminalization, foregrounding Indigenous mobility as both ancestral right and ongoing act of resistance.
In the lineage of Chicano printmaking and community-based art practices, Govea’s work situates itself within a continuum of collective visual activism. Her engagement with institutions such as the Smithsonian and The Huntington underscores a dual positionality: at once embedded in grassroots organizing and circulating within major art historical narratives. Yet, rather than diluting her message, this movement across spaces intensifies the dialogic quality of her work. Drawing from traditions of vernacular graphics and political poster-making, she produces imagery that is accessible without sacrificing conceptual rigor, where the immediacy of hand-painted lettering meets the layered symbolism of Indigenous cosmologies. Her inclusion in exhibitions like Refractions: Contemporary Indigenous Art further positions her practice within a broader constellation of artists grappling with the “in-between” spaces of identity, land, and futurity.
What distinguishes Govea’s oeuvre is its commitment to relationality: between past and present, land and body, art and community. Her murals and public works do not simply occupy space; they activate it, functioning as sites of both remembrance and projection. In this sense, her work echoes a feminist Indigenous methodology, one that insists on storytelling as both a form of care and a strategy of resistance. Trained in sign painting yet deeply invested in socio-political narrative, Govea collapses distinctions between craft and fine art, proposing instead a practice that is materially grounded and spiritually expansive. Through this synthesis, she constructs a visual language that is at once intimate and collective, insisting that art remains accountable to the communities and histories from which it emerges.
Interview
Marina: How would you describe your artwork to others?
Melissa: My work explores native feminist identity and living through the diaspora, utilized in the form of lettering and printmaking. I like making posters of empowerment and culturally relevant radical histories.
Marina: Why did you create your artwork with this particular media(s)?
Melissa: I love printmaking and murals because it’s widely accessible for everyone, not just stored away in galleries or museums. I think art is of importance when it can be shared in the community.
Marina: How have your life experiences influenced your art/art aesthetics?
Melissa: My art is influenced by my upbringing, my communities that deserve social change and dignified lives. I listen to the stories of my grandparents, parents and their experiences in this country and how they fought for their space and place here.
Marina: How have other artists or art genres influenced your work?
Melissa: Other artists like Melanie Cervantes influence my work because she is a woman printmaker and uses her skills to highlight social justice. I’m also influenced by graffiti and largescale work used to share messages. Lettering was my first medium so it will always be fueled by that.
Marina: What did you have to develop, try, or learn to create this artwork?
Melissa: I had to learn the art of printmaking which was nurtured at Self Help Graphics (a local non-profit). The more I volunteered the more they would teach me about the craft, through many trials and errors I learned and appreciated the process. I learned lettering at a two year trade program at LATTCC (Los Angeles Trade Tech Community College) and developed a sense of business when it came to large-scale painting for business or clients.
Marina: What is your relationship with your art?
Melissa: My relationship is personal but also very communal and shared experiences. It started as a form of therapy for myself and escalated to something that was shared in the community. I pour all my love into it and hope it empowers people like it does to me.
About the Artist
Melissa Govea (she/her/ella) is a Los-Angeles artist and member of the Heart of LA team. Drawing on her Purépecha heritage and upbringing in South Central Los Angeles, her practice encompasses printmaking, sign painting, and murals. Her work explores Indigenous identity, cultural memory, migration, and the power of art as a tool for community expression.
Interview by Marina Santana (she/her/ella)
Marina Santana is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and member of the Heart of LA team. Santana’s pedagogical endeavors emphasize socially-engaged practices that retain a commitment to decolonizing epistemologies and learner-centered strategies. She has been particularly influenced by Craig Owens postmodern theory of the deconstruction of an idea, or thought of society, to better critically analyze modern assumptions.
