Current Research

Rita Crocker Obelleiro is a doctoral student in Value-Creating Education for Global Citizenship. She uses arts-based research to investigate collaboration and community-building in the secondary art classroom, with the focus on hidden curriculum as the negative space that impacts the push and pull of the teaching and learning experience. For more on Value Creation see:

Goulah, J. (2021). Value creation and value-creating education in the work of Daisaku Ikeda, Josei Toda, and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education.

Artist Statement

In my work, I focus on the human—not as a noun, but as a verb. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s concept of “being human as praxis,” I approach the human as a pluriversal, co-creative, and interconnected way of being in the world. When depicting a subject through this lens, the figure often becomes fragmented, slipping across the boundaries between figure and ground.

In the mixed-media piece Holy Hand (2025), a small glass container shaped like a hand—found in a local trinket store—emits light toward floating feet that are both matter and non-matter. Both the hand and feet reference our own bodies; yet one is inanimate while acting, and the other feels living yet passive. This work began with shibori dye on fabric—a technique that leaves the picture plane open to chance, inviting the oneric which I later decode through observational study.

In compositions with multiple subjects, such as Co-Sleeping (2025), I document everyday practices that are innately human yet often marginalized in American contemporary culture: co-sleeping, breastfeeding, moving barefoot, mutual grooming, seeding, mourning, and other gestures of interdependence. Scale becomes integral to this inquiry, and artworks are either intimately small or monumentally large so they require closeness or assert presence.

In other pieces, like Hug (2025), I employ alternative photographic processes such as painting with developer on paper treated with silver gelatin, then digitally altering the resulting prints. A human gesture becomes a contour—traced, redacted, and reinterpreted by a color printer.

My practice unfolds without a fixed plan, guided instead by parameters such as select materials and objects, a set temperature, or a limited time frame. By also begining with an unpredictable surface, I allow it to propose a gesture or form and then respond. Through this hands-on dialogue, I document each material’s agentic tendencies—what it can and won’t do. This tactile exchange becomes pedagogical, and the insights I gain re-emerge in adjacent works. Images too resurface, forming a deliberate tautology that offers coherence across my practice.