SM Sanz Is the Muralist Painting Dallas in Vivid Feminist Hues

Oak Cliff residents can avoid the highway traffic headed downtown by driving east through the Tin District. About a mile after Fort Worth Avenue turns into Commerce Street, approaching the bridge over the Trinity River, three giant cowgirls of many colors appear on the left, bidding drivers farewell from the west side. Flags unfurled from the barrels of their toy pop-guns bear the reminder, “STAY WILD TX!” Strong and vibrant women tend to stand out in this city.

Painted by SM Sanz during the 2019 Wild West Mural Festival, "Stay Wild TX" has become a new treasured landmark that represents a revitalization of the Tin District. Once a mostly abandoned industrial pocket of West Dallas, the area has undergone a transformation in recent years to become a hub for accessible studio space and galleries for the local graffiti and street-art community.

When she moved to the city in 2019 from Panama, Stephanie Sanz (who works under the moniker SM Sanz) found exactly what she was looking for in the Fabrication Yard. Her work studio is just a stone’s throw from the mural.

“Panama is kind of a complicated place to make art, because there aren't as many resources as there are here.” she explains. “The financial situation of the economy [in Panama] was not doing that great. And I am very lucky and privileged that my parents had me in the U.S. before we moved to Panama. So I have citizenship. … I kind of wanted to try something new, and [Dallas] was a good place to land.”

Sanz’s story begins with creative inclinations cultivated in utero, when her mother created and operated a hand-painted T-shirt business during pregnancy. By the time she was a teenager, Sanz had become a self-taught working graphic designer, and her first client was her father’s restaurant consultancy business.

She studied journalism at Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua but found herself drawing through all of her classes. Her artistic horizons were rapidly expanding beyond commercial work, and she was increasingly drawn to street-art.

After finding mentors in seasoned painters Remedios (Camila Bernal), Martanoemi Noriega and Insano (Danniel Baker)  Sanz painted her first mural in Panama City at the age of 20, cementing her passion for the medium. Over the next decade, she completed murals throughout Latin America. After painting in Mexico City, she decided it was time to head farther north and settled in Dallas.
Sanz’s work is inherently feminist. Her subjects project strength and power from the canvas or the wall to effectively confront viewers with the vast multitudes contained in the essence of woman. Whether they’re wistfully folded in the fetal position or standing proud in their unapologetic sensuality, all of her muses hold a delicate stare in their eyes that depicts the vulnerability necessary to embody true courage.

“I feel like [women] are often the protagonists of art, but not the artist,” Sanz says. “I just feel like I draw things that are overtly feminine, overtly cute, prettier and pink or whatever because I feel like it's so often that we are put into a second-class. … The street-art world [in Latin America] is hyper-competitive, and women have to work twice as hard to even be taken seriously. So I was like, I'm going to draw the girliest shit ever and be taken seriously anyway.”

Her signature use of color is not psychedelic, nor is it a saturated caricature of what a woman represents. But it is lively and striking, which makes it all the more surprising that Sanz has grown to use color to define her sense of boundaries within the artistic process.

“Maybe it doesn't look that way, but I like to have a limit on [color] to challenge myself. In my practice, when I used a ton of different colors, it felt like a lack of control,” Sanz says. “I think there's artists who are really good at using a ton of color. I just think for me personally, it just didn't work. So I just try to be like, ‘OK, what can I make with like three colors?’ And from there it falls into this whole thing of texture and half tones … and it's much more costly to paint a mural when you're using 40 colors.”

SM Sanz is also known to place her characters against backdrops of lush landscapes to encompass a feminine connection to the natural world, and her prevalent use of repetition plays a role close to her heart.

“The overall imagery definitely draws from my family. I like to draw [women] in threes, and that’s because I’m one of three sisters in my household. It’s my mom, my dad and three sisters. So the repetition is kind of an ode to that.”

Though she has experience beyond her years, SM Sanz is still in the early chapters of her career. Looking to the future, she aims to paint murals throughout the U.S. Aspiring to transcend traditional avenues of visual art, she dreams of one day collaborating with skate companies and musicians to further inject her creative vision into album art and board decks.

Sanz believes art is ultimately for the masses, not reserved for the elite collector. She’s earnestly driven to bring her work to the people, to the streets, in every possible way she can.

SM Sanz’s next exhibition will open on Sept. 14 at Coronado Print Shop in Austin.