Student and Alumni Spotlights – Get To Know Our Students!

Alayah Fierro was born and raised in Albuquerque and is in her third year at UNM. She is majoring in art studio with plans to graduate in 2025! Her plans post-graduation include selling her artwork and participating in gallery exhibitions. She hopes to get her name out in the art world and keep creating, with plans to also get her real estate license.

Alayah has always loved making art and would love to pursue it as a career. Her preferred medium is oil painting. Though she started her painter’s journey at age six with acrylic paints, she grew to love oils. Out of the works she has created, she is most proud of her painting of Our Lady of the Rosary. She combined painting and her skills as a sewer to include a rosary to give her painting a sculptural effect. Alayah loves to paint photographs she has taken and has begun to expand her practice into painting people. A piece of advice she would give to new painters is to go with the flow and to not think about what you are going to paint too much. Trust yourself as an artist and let your intuition as a painter guide you. Painting shouldn’t be stressful; it should feel meditative.

India Rael Young is the Curator of Art and Images at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. Her scholarship centers on multiples and Indigenous arts. Young graduated in 2017 with a doctorate in art history from the University of New Mexico. She went on to Princeton University Art Museum as the Andrew W. Mellon Research Specialist in Native American Art. Young curates exhibitions internationally, most recently Between Us: Adad Hannah’s Social Distancing Portraits. She has written for BlackFlash, Canadian Art, and First American Art on topics ranging from works on paper to new media. Young also consults on inclusive collection strategies and institutional decolonizing methodologies.