Esperanza "Chepa" Ortiz

Chepa comes from a long line of santeros, though she'll tell you she took the family tradition somewhere stranger. Working out of a small studio behind her house, she builds three-dimensional saint shrines — nichos — out of found tins, cigar boxes, scrap wood, rusted hardware, and carved wooden santos she makes herself, then finishes each piece to look like it's been sitting in a desert chapel for a hundred years. Equal parts devotional object and folk-art collage, her shrines are as much about the objects' second life as the saints they hold.