Ana Ximena Mendoza Salazar
- Jun 3
- 4 min read
Interview with Katie Bonadies, June 2026
Ana Ximena Mendoza Salazar paints with pastels and watercolor and works with clay. Mendoza Salazar joined Running With Scissors in August 2025 after meeting two members at the RWS booth during Maine Crafts Association’s Portland Fine Craft Show. Mendoza Salazar had just moved to Portland and accepted their invitation to tour the studios because they were so friendly. “It was meant to be. It saved me; to feel I could be part of the community. They believe in it.”
Art has always been Mendoza Salazar’s true passion. “It fills my soul.” She always loved painting and drawing but didn’t have time for it during her twelve years of medical school and professional training. She was inspired to start painting again ten years ago when one of her patients recommended a group of artists in northern Maine. Painting is a means for Mendoza Salazar to transmute her stress from working as an endocrinologist. Mendoza Salazar took adult education art classes every Monday night for a decade; that’s how she developed her skills and got back into making art. The teacher, David Haskins, became her art mentor and was instrumental in guiding her back into her love for art.
Painting is a manifestation and expression of the deep feelings Mendoza Salazar cannot describe in words. Her initial focus was painting Mayan women heavily dressed in native wear to symbolize the feeling of the world on her shoulders. Each Mayan ethnic group has different dresswear, and each region of Guatemala has a different embroidery design. Mendoza Salazar would like to draw and make a pastel painting of each of the 100 principal municipalities of Guatemala – she has completed five regions so far. All of the women she has painted are symbolic self-portraits. As the years progressed the women have become less and less clothed until, eventually, Mendoza Salazar started painting nudes as a symbol of her freedom. Painting was a healing journey that helped her process her grief.
Pastel paintings by Ana Ximena Mendoza Salazar.
In the past couple of years Mendoza Salazar has been going back to her roots of Mayan culture, which she avoided because of its connection to her trauma. Mendoza Salazar grew up in Guatemala during the civil war in the 80s. Her mother and father were involved in the guerrilla resistance movement fighting for people's rights. Her mind was so anxious and occupied with survival that she never heard a bird or noticed a flower. Now that she’s done a lot of personal work, she’s able to come face to face with the pain from her childhood.
Painting again has led her to clay, and clay has become her true canvas. Clay was a major part of Mayan culture and Mendoza Salazar feels she has tapped into that in this new desire to make pottery. Her vessels are inspired by the Mayan ceramic polychrome vessels that were an integral part of Mayan culture. She’s learning how to read Mayan glyphs and is trying to honor their forgotten written language and symbolism by putting them onto clay vessels. The experience has brought her full circle and connected her back to her roots.
When she discovered pottery, she found that it not only filled her soul, but it also grounded her. Mendoza Salazar never thought pottery would capture her heart so deeply, but the tactile part made her feel like she finally found her ultimate love. She builds functional and sculptural pottery from terracotta slabs and uses red and black glazes; the colors found in Mayan codices and ceramics due to the pigments available at the time. Red and black are also Mendoza Salazar’s favorite colors, which makes her feel like she’s in the right place. She jokes about being in a relationship with ‘Clay’, “It’s loving, romantic, reciprocal, draws me in and grounds me. It's fulfilling. I finally found my soul mate!” Clay is the culmination of all she has always looked for in art, and she wants to make pottery for the rest of her life.
Artwork by Ana Mendoza Salazar. Impression in clay with Mayan glyphs.
Mendoza Salazar’s goal is to develop a series of vessels that have Mayan culture wrapped into every aspect. Her vessels have texture, with carved surfaces that depict different nahual, symbols that are the visual embodiment of the spiritual energy of the person born on each of the 20 days of the Tzolk’in Mayan calendar. Nahual incorporates spiritual animals as well, including a jaguar, mouse, lion, or hummingbird. Each of Mendoza Salazar’s vessels represent a different nahual. Mendoza Salazar’s personal nahual is the “Iq” energy, the guardian, represented by a hummingbird. Those born under the Iq nahual are spiritual people who are healers with energy in the snowy mountains. This is the project she’s working on for fun to sell at the RWS Holiday Sale in December. She is also working on a series of vessels and plates with glyphs carved into them that she envisions in an art show.
Clay has a magical quality for Mendoza Salazar. “Art is manifest in everything.” When Mendoza Salazar creates this work, she imagines herself in the Mayan villages where people are growing their beans, squash, and corn; women are cooking and making tortillas, vessels, and pottery; and scribes are writing religious astronomy on vessels and in codices. “I feel like I am living a hundred years ago. I would have loved to be in that world, to be part of the community of my ancestors.” Making Mayan pottery is Mendoza Salazar’s way of honoring her culture. For her it feels like tapping into the energy and protection of her ancestors, like she’s living in a spiritual realm.
Healing has allowed Mendoza Salazar to find that she belongs to something bigger than herself, to Mesoamerican culture. “I never belonged and, as a lonely child trying to find a way in the world, I feel like I belong to something now.” She enjoys creating at RWS because belonging to a community of same-minded, passionate artists has those same magical healing properties. She feels she would be missing out if she were working out of a little studio in her house.
Ana Ximena Mendoza Salazar currently has a painting in Creative Portland’s “Resistance” show, and she is writing a book about her life and artwork. Contact Mendoza Salazar through her website, www.artbyaxm.com, or email anaxmendoza@gmail.com.
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