Andrea Lopez is Changing Spaces

Andrea Lopez

Andrea Lopez never set out to “become an artist” in the way people like to frame it. She simply never stopped creating. Drawing and painting were part of her childhood, then became a daily practice in high school as she pushed herself to get better. The bigger question was not whether she loved art. It was whether art could love her back in the form of stability. She heard the same warnings many young creatives do. The starving artist narrative. The fear. The doubt. Then real life gave her a door.

While living in Georgia for four years, Lopez worked at a Mexican restaurant. Her coworkers knew she painted, so they asked her to paint holiday windows. She said yes. The windows led to more windows. The word spread to other local businesses. Then came the question that shifted everything. A coffee shop owner saw her work and asked if she would paint a mural inside the space. She had never done one before, but she said yes again. That first wall taught her what she had been looking for. Art could be public. Art could be collaborative. Art could change how a space feels, and how a community moves through it.

After returning to California, Lopez decided to go all in. She joined Eastside Art House, an artist collective and co-working studio, and learned by doing. She assisted, observed, took on projects, and slowly began landing her own. The more she painted, the more her voice sharpened, and the more her family roots began to show up in the work.

A recent cultural piece, Hija del Maíz, captured that clarity. Lopez created that project, rooted in her family’s Mexican lineage and the farming histories on both sides. Corn became the center, not just as food, but as tradition. She built the story around a mother figure praying for rain, a nod to the way her grandparents relied on nature to grow crops. Her sister modeled. Her boyfriend was photographer. The final image felt like homage and memory at once, and it opened a deeper lane for her work.

That momentum brought recognition, too. Through her studio, she was featured in Riverside Magazine. She did a photo shoot that paired her personality with her murals and quickly learned something new. Her community was proud, and her family’s early worries shifted into belief.

Lopez balances commissions with passion projects. Murals pay the bills through a clear, square-footage-based pricing structure, and that stability lets her protect the work she feels attached to. Long term, she wants to shift from painting other people’s visions to creating larger canvas pieces that collectors and galleries seek out for her voice alone. For now, she keeps painting where people can see it. For her community. For her roots. For the stories that still deserve color.