Maya Art’s Hoja Santa takes shape around a year spent in 2017 with an Afro-Mexican community in Costa Chica, Oaxaca. Living in the home of Juliana, a lawyer, and her teenage daughter, Veronica, Art entered a social world whose continuity depends substantially on women. Juliana introduced her to healers, midwives, widows, single mothers, and women raising large families—figures connected by knowledge, labor, and mutual reliance within a community marked by a history of violence.
The book considers three closely entwined subjects: the social structures of Afro-Mexican village life, the meeting of Catholic and African spiritual traditions, and women’s place within the community. Healing practices and beliefs in concealed forces are not treated as picturesque details; they belong to the everyday reality Art encountered. Her photographs attend to this environment while recognizing that its meanings cannot be contained by straightforward observation alone.
Art therefore moves beyond a conventionally documentary vocabulary. Collage, painting, and interventions made directly upon photographs register memory, cultural overlap, and her own response to the village. The project is also autobiographical: Art has described its layered form as reflecting her multicultural background. This combination of witnessed experience and worked image complicates any easy separation between document and interpretation, creating a book in which surface, sequence, and personal implication carry equal weight.
Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2023, the hardcover volume extends across 176 pages. It developed from a maquette made during a workshop led by Ana Casas and Ramon Pez at the invitation of the Mexico City organization Hydra; that maquette received the Dummy Book Award at the 2022 Rencontres d’Arles. For collectors, Hoja Santa is significant not simply as a record of a particular community, but as a carefully constructed example of contemporary photography engaging anthropology, spiritual syncretism, gender, and autobiography through the photobook form.
