Los Angeles area artist, Emily Araújo’s work of the past twenty years has focused on drawing and installation practices. Her work ranges in scale and materials-- from beadwork on snapshots to wall drawings.
From her earliest forays into drawing, Araújo was intrigued by the concept of negative space. Paying attention to negative space when drawing is a technique of visually defining the space around a subject as a way to represent it. As a lover of word play, the term negative space has long been a rich conceptual source for Araújo too, as useful to her as the drawing technique itself.
Much of Araújo’s work features negative space as a concept. There are literal holes: cut, punched, pierced and drawn in her pieces. That which is missing or removed often becomes the subject or focal point of the work itself.
Emily Araújo has a certificate in Textile and Surface Design from Otis College of Art and Design (2013), an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2001) and a BFA in printmaking from California College of the Arts (1995).
Artist-in-residence at Mount Saint Mary's College, Los Angeles in 2006 and at Stiftung Futur in Rapperswil, Switzerland in 2007, Araújo received a Pasadena Cultural Affairs grant in 2009.
Araújo has worked with the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech since 2010. In the fall of 2022 she joined the Artnauts Collective and plans to launch textile and surface design collections in the spring of 2023.