Bio

Pilar Lagos is a Honduran visual artist based in Long Island City, NY, working across print, drawing, and painting. Her practice engages the body, memory, and disability, drawing on personal experiences to explore themes of pain, resilience and transformation.

Her work has been exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH), Scandinavia House (New York, NY), the School of Visual Arts, and Miami International Fine Arts, among others. She is a 2025 recipient of the New Work Queens Arts Fund from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and an alumna of NYFA's Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. She has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Directangle Press, and Zea Mays Printmaking. Lagos holds a B.A. in Communication and Advertising from Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana (Honduras) and an M.A. in Journalism from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Artist Statement

My work explores estrangement from culture and body, and I create in response to the inner conversations between alienation and longing. Uprooted from my Latino culture at an early age and raised in a foreign country rich with customs that were not mine, I constantly carry a latent sense of never truly feeling at home anywhere.

My printmaking practice consists primarily of collagraphs, monotypes, drypoints and etchings. I build collagraph plates from medicine blister packs, string, and acrylic mediums. These plates are not meant to be archival; instead, they mimic the wear and tear our bodies endure while navigating systems not designed for us. Through printmaking, I explore social masking as a strategy for individuals navigating life with chronic illness, drawing from a wide body of medical and disability scholarship.

In my painting practice, I incorporate found materials to evoke the raw emotions of pain, the alienation of the body, and the impersonal nature of the medical industry—like my name, constantly mispronounced by medical personnel. These materials confront the abstract concept of “health” as defined by institutions that demand proof of invisible disability. My paintings also include my cat, Cleo. While these images may seem disparate from my medical trauma work, they explore the impossibility of the rendered image: a clear connection to the MRIs and CT scans I use to show an impossibly incomplete rendering of a human life.

My hope is for others to connect with the work and see themselves in it: not as objects of medical sympathy, but as people of resilience, complexity, and beauty. I make art on my own terms, rejecting productivity norms, and using imperfect and repurposed materials.