Anna Marie Lopez is an American artist born in Houston, Texas. Art has always been a part of her life since she was a child and as an adult, she parlayed that into a career as an industrial and graphic designer, working for Kodak and several advertising agencies.

As a young woman, she spent years in and out of hospital emergency rooms and state psychiatric institutions before being diagnosed with devastating depression.

During those times, the misunderstood were tied up in straitjackets and thrown into padded rooms.
They were strapped to cots lit up like light bulbs with electric shock therapy, doing the Thorazine shuffle, and scorned by disappointed families for being “crazy.”

With the diagnosis came renewal.
Her passion and resolve pushed her to draw on those experiences creatively, and she emerged as an artist with little regard for niceties but a belly full of resourceful fire.

In the years before reaching the art world with my uncompromising visions of mental health and life as a Mexican-American gay artist, her work was received by galleries across the U.S. as some of the most significant paintings produced by a Latin female painter.

Her vehement, blunt, and wounded portraits and dreamscapes began to be collected quickly — transitioning her from obscure to visible overnight, especially after a feature in Curve Magazine and my controversial piece Virgin, which became the subject of a censorship dispute between a San Antonio gallery and the National Coalition Against Censorship.