The Broad

Jay Lynn Gomez paints from personal experience. Growing up in the Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles, her mother worked as a school janitor and her father as a trucker— both were undocumented Mexican immigrants. In 2009, while working as a live-in nanny in Beverly Hills, Gomez noticed that luxury magazines featuring homes similar to the one she worked in were always devoid of the housekeepers, gardeners, and other workers who were essential to their care: “Acutely aware of this omission, I began to rip the pages of the magazine out and add these people to them.” That experience—one of simultaneous assimilation and alienation—has fueled much of her artistic practice since.