Local spotlight: Patricia Schnall Gutierrez

"Self Portraits With Polka Dots" encompasses nine black-and-white photographs, each showing artist Patricia Schnall Gutierrez standing in a hallway between the doorways to her bedroom and her art studio. Wrapped in a weighty cloth that trails behind her, she's surrounded by digitally added circular and oval dots.

The dots — in orange, purple, yellow, aqua, black and green — represent the cheery facade of a woman trying to balance family and career.

Patricia Schnall Gutierrez

"What's on the surface is not always what's underneath," Gutierrez says of the work that hangs in "Women's Perspectives," a group show running through Aug. 24 at Miami's Dina Mitrani Gallery. "There are demons that all of us have in those dark moments at 3 in the morning when we wake up."

For Gutierrez, these demons were about the guilt she consistently felt over not spending enough hours on her art or her family.

"I was taught when I went to school during the feminist movement, that we can do it all," she says. What she learned, after getting married in 1976 and having the first of three children, is that we can't do it all as perfectly as we might like. ...

Read the rest of Arterpillar's story in the Sun Sentinel's June 24 Lifestyle section.

Above is a slide show of some of Gutierrez's art works. To see the captions while watching the slide show, click the arrow in the middle, then click in the lower right hand corner of the slide show to expand the pics and then click on "show info" at top right (to see the details that accompany each photo). Or simply view the Flickr set.