Born in East Los Angeles and raised in Riverside, California, Denise Silva (Xicana / Hopi / Mescalero Apache) is an indigenous femme, a mother, grandmother, a total Pisces sun/Cancer moon, exploring plant medicine + mysticism and weaving those experiences into her creative world.
In her earlier years, she attended Riverside Community College and went on to graduate from California State University, Los Angeles in the late 90’s where she studied art + illustration.
Motherhood brought Denise back to the Inland Empire to put down roots + raise a family while homeschooling and starting a home business writing articles for several websites and teaching art workshops. It was during those beautifully chaotic years that she began to slowly immerse herself in community art spaces in downtown Riverside. Fully embracing the diy aesthetic, Denise was also nurturing an online space for women + mothers on Pearmama dot com, which started off as a humble mom blog in 2006.
Connecting the art and the writing has always been the vision.
Denise shares spiritual medicine in the form of art, divine messages to find our way home, uplifting the Divine Feminine to shift the culture at large + collectively heal the Earth and one another. At the center of Denise’s art practice is her spirituality:
Elevating the ancestors, telling the story of Mother Earth, big rematriation energy
a humble bow toward the plants
the water
the animals
the land
Drawing + creating stories was a refuge as a latch-key child in the 80’s. As a means of coping, Denise created little fantasy worlds for herself when the one she was living in couldn’t be understood. The artist is still creating those fantasy worlds for herself, vast + expansive, exploring the wise woman path: inner child, maiden, mother, crone.
A multi-disciplinary artist best known for her conceptual work with paint, collage, paper, murals and creative installation, Denise began exploring digital art in 2018 and she discovered it expanded her practice in many life-changing ways.
The art is intentionally woman-centered + Earth-centered, rich with sacred Mesoamerican symbols, ancestral veneration and Divine Feminine mysticism. The work fuses together storytelling with bold figurative shapes, universal symbols of feminine creation + dream-like color stories that bring to remembrance innerspaces we have visited in other realms.
There is zero use of ai in the ideation + creation of Pearmama art. All words and illustrations divinely inspired + originally created by artist Denise Silva.
Denise has worked from her home studio in Riverside California since day one, a survival tactic that most creatives who are also parents can understand. A delicate balance but a very necessary one: it allowed her to be home with her children, normalizing the practice of being creative, doing what you love to do + being a grounded presence in the family.
The artist works in the energy + style of Indigenous Futurism which draws upon our ancient indigenous technologies for inspiration and our collective liberation. Denise uses her art + vision to be in conversation with one another, to uplift the collective spirit + to raise the vibration of our communities. She creates art to uplift the feminine energy’s protective influence on Mother Earth + to remind us of our cosmic roots.
Denise has been very active in the Inland Empire art community leading art sessions, creating dynamic art programming + exhibiting her work in local spaces such as The Garcia Center for the Arts, Palm Springs Art Museum, The Center for Social Justice & Civil Liberties, Pain Sugar Gallery, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, The Little Gallery of San Bernardino, Ontario Museum of History & Art, The Arts Area, Barrio Fuerza and All Eyes Gallery. The artist also has strong connections to the rest of her Southern California art community, working with Centro Cultural de la Raza, Tonalli Studio, Espacio 1839, Plaza de la Raza + Self-Help Graphics, to name a few.
Pearmama evolved from a mother’s journal about life with a large family to a lifestyle blog with DIY projects, sponsored posts and stories about family and motherhood to its current iteration — sharing her art + writing from the ancient heartspace on Corn Sister.