Sandra Mayo Maps Family Trauma Through Genogram Art

By Kara Baskin for JewishBoston

Sandra Mayo, a CJP and JArts Community Creative Fellow, uses genogram art to transform family trauma into powerful visual stories that connect past and present.

The emotional history of families is intense, multilayered and often impossible to capture in mere words.

Sandra Mayo demystifies these histories and complexities in visual form as a printmaker. She specializes in genograms. Envision more nuanced family trees: These visual representations of dynamics, relationships and personal histories crystallize emotions and layers that are sometimes too deep, or too painful, for mere conversation.

“Genograms are family trees that come alive, because they not only tell you who is related to whom, but also what type of relationships exist within the people. They’re even used by therapists because, in 15 minutes, you can tell the family’s patterns,” she explains. These patterns can be straightforward, such as a history of illness, or more complicated, such as a legacy of mothers and daughters with fraught relationships.

In particular, Mayo’s work focuses on trauma and human rights abuses. In 2022, her exhibition, “Beyond Trauma: Roots and Routes,” won the Leonard Bernstein Festival for the Creative Arts award at Brandeis University.

Mayo hails from Argentina, where she was active in the Jewish community: preparing girls for bat mitzvah, singing in choirs, leading Israeli folk dancing classes. She came to the United States for graduate school, focusing on education. As a student, she took a class on genograms and, as a longtime hobbyist in the arts, became transfixed.

Mayo creates the prints by interviewing family members, which requires trust and delicacy. She is skilled in both, having begun her genogram journey by focusing on individuals who endured two major social traumas: surviving the Holocaust and later experiencing the disappearance of a son or daughter during Argentina’s Dirty War (desaparecidos).

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