Before Mexican American artist Michelle “Mr. B Baby” Guerrero began her career as a muralist, she used her face as a canvas and makeup was her medium of choice. Starting as young as 14 years old, Guerrero and her friends would spend hours creating bold looks, painting their eyes with a rainbow of colors and adding splashes of dusty pink to their cheeks.
Credit: Wendy Cubillo“It was always like a form of self-expression, and it’s just something that I do for myself as self-care,” the 37-year-old tells Los Angeles. “It’s always been something that’s been a part of my life, and when I was younger it definitely started as an artistic practice. My friends and I had a camcorder, and we would just sit in our rooms and do our makeup. We would do crazy looks, and we would just have so much fun with it.”
Recently, Guerrero’s love of makeup and art merged when Selena Gomez’s beauty brand, Rare Beauty, commissioned her to create an original mural at Las Fotos, a free public studio space in L.A., for its #RareConsejo campaign in honor of Latine Heritage month. The brand tasked her with interpreting the campaign’s central mantra: “El mar recibe todos los ríos,” which translates to “the sea welcomes all rivers.”
Credit: Wendy Cubillo“One of the things I love most about being Latina is the incredible sense of community,” Gomez shares in a statement. “There’s always this feeling of connection and belonging. This mural reflects that feeling in a space designed to bring people together.”
#RareConsejo is Rare Beauty’s annual campaign for Latine Heritage Month that celebrates community storytelling. The word consejo means “advice” in Spanish, connecting back to its origins in 2023 as a content series featuring Latine members of the Rare Beauty team sharing personal wisdom and beauty secrets passed down by loved ones. The campaign has grown into a yearly tradition highlighting creative expression and cultural pride, with the beauty brand using it as an opportunity to also highlight the work of local Latine artists and businesses.
The resulting art piece from this year’s partnership is a dreamlike picture of cartoon-style dolls in boats floating on a colorful river around a central woman figure. Guerrero took her time coming up with her interpretation of the campaign, making sure it didn’t just represent her own thoughts, but also the ideas of the Latine community around her in L.A.
“I asked a couple of my friends,” Guerrero explains of her creative process. “I wanted to gather all these ideas of what that quote meant to myself and the community, and I came up with this idea of this central figure who is representative of an inner child, and these boats around her basically symboliz[e] all the different paths that we could take in our life.”
Credit: Wendy CubilloSince moving to L.A. 10 years ago, Guerrero feels her artwork has been embraced by the local Latine community, something she believes is a result of the symbols she uses frequently throughout her work, including the Rare mural. The dolls in the boats, Guerrero points out, are reminiscent of Lelé dolls. Also called Maria dolls, these traditional handcrafted Mexican rag dolls are known for their colorful woven dresses, long braided hair adorned with bright ribbons and embroidered features. Guerrero says that when she is creating people, these cartoon-style dolls are what she gravitates towards.
“They signify a lot to me. People will see me painting and get excited because they know what those are, and they connect to them and I love to be able to include pieces of my work where people feel connected and represented,” Guerrero says. “But also those little dolls have always represented keeping the inner child alive, which I feel like in my art career, and being able to like create a career out of being an artist, and by drawing cartoons, it’s very much like respecting my inner child, and it’s a part of me that I never let die.”
Growing up in Chula Vista, Guerrero struggled with anxiety and depression. For her, art was an escape, a colorful world of creativity she could immerse herself in, it was a place where she felt she belonged. Now as a professional artist based in L.A., Guerrero has connected with her community through her work.
“A lot of my themes connect back to mental health, and people have reached out to me to say how it’s healed them,” she says. “It’s been very cool to see that through my art the one thing I used to escape actually ended up connecting me back to my community.”
Mental health is something Guerrero connects on with Rare. Just as she has helped heal others through her art, Rare Beauty exhibits its own support by giving 1% of annual sales to the Rare Impact Fund. Founded by Gomez in 2020, the organization raises funds to make mental health services and information more accessible.
Guerrero champions mental health with her pieces through the imagery used in her work, rooted in her cultural upbringing and connecting back to the idea of nurturing her inner child. Even the medium she works in, spray paint, is steeped in childhood memories. Guerrero links the technique back to the graffiti of her hometown, an art form she was always interested in but never had the chance to experiment with growing up.
Credit: Wendy Cubillo“I’d always like to try to paint with them, and they would kind of be like, ‘Nah this is a guy’s thing,’” she recalls. “When I got older, [it became] my act of rebellion. Like no, it’s not a guy’s thing. I’m going to teach myself how to do it,” Guerrero said.
Rare Beauty is inviting communities to create their own “rivers” and visit the mural in person at the Las Fotos gallery space, located at 2210 E Cesar E Chavez Ave.
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