Local Jewish artist featured in ‘Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh’ exhibition

Besides holding special meaning for her family, Yafa Negrete hopes her collage helps people better understand Jewish identity.

When Yafa Negrete showed her son, Daniel, a handful of Mexican pesos for his coin collection, he exclaimed: “Look, Daddy, coins in Spanish!” Negrete, whose Sephardic family emigrated from Syria to Mexico, created a watercolor collage based on this moment.

Because Daniel has autistism and has a speech delay, his exclamation was especially meaningful to her — a rare opportunity to connect with her son through words.

“I told him, ‘Those coins are from where your mommy and daddy were born,’” Negrete remembered. “It was a very exciting moment.”

The collage she created, titled “Look, Daddy, Coins in Spanish!”, uses Negrete’s grandfather’s migration card, family photographs and maps depicting where Daniel’s ancestors came from. She submitted the collage to the “Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh” showcase put on by the Carnegie Library, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and 1Hood Media after hearing that the exhibition wanted work inspired by archives.

“I could talk for hours about libraries and archives,” Negrete said. “My father had shelves full of books at home and we didn’t watch much television — we more listened to music or read. My parents also took me to museums a lot as a little girl.”

Negrete uses her interest in archives to meticulously document her family’s genealogy. For her master’s thesis at Chatham University, she studied Mexico’s Jewish community by connecting with researchers like Monica Unikel, who runs a museum in Mexico dedicated to Jewish history.

Negrete’s artwork merges her academic background in archives with her innate creativity and honed skills. “Look, Daddy Coins in Spanish!” features a watercolor portrait of Daniel, surrounded by collage elements that include personal artifacts and some of Negrete’s other paintings. At the collage’s center, Daniel’s pale blue eyes look back at the viewers, and in the upper right corner similar blue eyes appear on her husband’s grandfather. Though Negrete is best known for her portraiture, this piece takes her technical skill at photorealistic faces and blends it with her personal archive.

Though Negrete said her son just says, “That’s Danny!” when he sees the portrait and doesn’t understand its themes, the piece has given him a visual way to relate to his family history. The moment when he saw the pesos helped Daniel connect to his cultural background and gave him the words to express it.

Negrete also hopes her collage helps people better understand Jewish identity. The mission statement of “Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh” states that it “invited artists from across the region to respond to the question: What if our beloved region worked for everyone?”

At a time when so much of the Jewish community feels alienated from conversations around social justice, the inclusion of Negrete’s work in the exhibition is an opportunity for dialogue and education. The 2026 call for art focused on whose stories get told in archives and how those stories are preserved. For Negrete, her art practice is a way of shedding light on the lives of Jews in Latin America.

“When I came here, people asked me ‘Are there Jews in Mexico?’ I said, well, there are 40,000 of us, and my grandparents came from Syria. They then would ask ‘Oh, they were Muslim, then?’ when we are Sephardic Jews,” Negrete said. “It’s important to show them that we Jews come from anywhere, and stories change from family to family.”

The exhibition “Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh” opens February 20 at 6 p.m. at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and is free and open to the public. PJC

Emma Riva is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.