Mano Ya is a collaboration between artists Mario Correa and Zen Sekizawa. They make custom furniture and objects informed by legacies of Mexican and Japanese design, woodworking techniques, and art histories.

Their collective name which mobilizes “Mano” the Spanish word for hand, and “Ya” the Japanese word for shop points to the intention and care that their collaboration asserts around making by hand. In doing so, their work considers the provenance of materials, politics of local production and the communities that their objects will serve as valuable to the life of an object as its aesthetics and utility.

Separately, Correa maintains a practice as a painter and printmaker, while Sekizawa is a practicing photographer and director.

Correa holds an MFA from Cal Arts while Sekizawa holds a BFA in Photography from Art Center College of Design.

Their experience within the realms of commercial art production, and fine art practices, alongside collaborations with community to present a model for how we might undertake interdisciplinary collaborations that enact diasporic legacies of craft, grounded in liberatory conceptual politics of making in collaboration with our communities.

Instead of neutral spaces of encounter, Mano Ya produces objects that respond to the demands and needs of their context, and seek to articulate paths toward solidarity with one another.