Visual artist and muralist Michelle Angela Ortiz is perhaps best known for her national and international public art displays depicting immigration and family separation topics. While they may not come across in every mural or installation she creates, the foundations of her work reside in her own family history.

Ortiz, of South Philadelphia, is giving Montgomery County Community College (MCCC) a rare opportunity to showcase some of her most intimate creations as part of the “Quizás Mañana” (which translates to “Maybe Tomorrow”) exhibit, which runs from Nov. 8 through Jan. 18 in the Fine Arts Center Gallery, Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. An opening reception will be held on Nov. 8 from 5-7 p.m. when the public can meet Ortiz and see her work. Both the reception and exhibit are free and open to the community.

A child of immigrant parents from Puerto Rico and Colombia, Ortiz’s installation touches on such themes as motherhood, the continuum of life and the loss of a loved one.

“This work is really kind of the foundation of the work I’ve always been doing as an artist,” said Ortiz, adding that the narratives underline the importance of telling one’s story and honoring individual and family experiences. “This is kind of coming back to where I started as a young girl and as a young arts student.”

MCCC Galleries Director Patrick Rodgers said he became interested in her work for its aesthetic and technical appeal. He expressed excitement about displaying the work of Ortiz, who over the summer was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute and was recently named a 2018 Pew Fellow.

“Michelle is amazing at taking a space—whether it’s a wall, a public space, or a gallery—and turning it into an experience,” he said. “In this exhibit she uses just a few pieces—or what she calls ‘visual artifacts’—to connect people with elements of her family and her upbringing, and beyond that, her sense of the past and of the future. It's a deeply personal experience that she conveys, one that speaks to her standpoint as a child of immigrants, and it can have a lot of meaning and significance for others who experience it.”

Rodgers also noted that her work “relies as much on light, space, and the atmosphere of the gallery as it does on the art pieces themselves.”

“Quizás Mañana” was previously installed at Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia last spring.

The exhibit is centered on Ortiz’s family story and history, she said. Light boxes depict her as a soon-to-be mother, while another illustrates the continuum of one generation to the next with her father and young son. The most poignant piece, “Becoming Light Again,” was the first installation following the death of her grandmother, who she describes as having been “very present in my life and still is.”

The empty chair with an image painted on the wall “tells the story of her wanting to go back to her homeland and eventually passing away.”

“It was difficult,” Ortiz said, adding that it took her three years since her grandmother’s death to create the piece. “It was kind of like a deep breath in and out. I was able to really begin to handle the grief of physically losing my grandmother and finding a way to reclaim her life.”