La Quarentena: Corona Santa (Catherine y Ines de Liberty City) is a pieta diptych documenting a Nicaraguan-American mother and her pregnant daughter adorned with a handwoven Andean serape resting in divine sunlight. The votive image documents pandemic front line workers of mixed race and immigration status, taken while the Corona virus pandemic was crowning in Miami in August 2020. Preserving life saving Cuarentena traditions during Quarantine, the family migrates the tradition whose postpartum practice of extended family support for the first forty days after birth as the ancestors pass through the fertile body, returning to the contemporary spiritual plane.

La Cuarantena diptych is a fertility effigy demonstrating the vulnerability and strength of Catherine Ortiz from Liberty City Miami FL and her mother Ines Cordonero. The votive depicts an apparition of Catherine’s birth recalling the classical Pieta images of European painting traditions with the indigenous serape textiles cradling the mother, her daughter and her granddaughter within the womb. The iconic portrayal Catherine Ortiz, a Nicaraguan- American pregnant woman and front line worker from a mixed race and mixed immigration status family who prepares to give birth, supported by her mother offers a dignified divinity to the viewer as the fertility votive glorifies matriarchal survival structures in vulnerable, melanated Miami communities. Part of the Linea Negra series documentary photography project (2007-Present), the diptych was taken while the Corona virus pandemic was crowning in Miami in August 2020 during the height of hurricane season. The artist and Catherine developed the image during a full spectrum Mama Spa Botanica workshop where according to the familial labor rituals surviving millenia in the Americas that were combined with syncretic traditions translated from pre-colonial period to today. The Cuarentena or Quarantine tradition offers community support in the form of rest and restoration for the new mother and baby as they recover the first 40 days postpartum.

Culture is medicine in historically redlined neighborhoods in Miami such as Liberty City, when vital practices are central to the survival of immigrant, melanated, Latinx birthing people whose assimilation into US American violence and policy dictates deadly outcomes in delivery rooms. During the Corona Virus pandemic in Miami, hospital births were increasingly dangerous as doulas were banned from hospital wards. Miami is the epicenter of the Reproductive Health Crisis in America for melanated birthing people and babies dying at 6-12 x rate of white women birthing in hospitals. Florida has the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality in the US, and the industrialized world where as of 2023 Journal of American Medicine 228 deaths per 100,000 live births doubled the highest nationwide state rate. Birthing advocates such as chosen or inherited family members, extended family or doulas have the biggest impact on decreasing birthing complications and death rates amongst immigrant, melanated pregnant people. Recent policy initiatives targeting low income communities of color such as Catherine’s in Liberty City, have created birthing deserts where hospital closures and legal C sections outside of medical settings- reinstate Jim Crow era institutionalized racism and structural violence in medicine. The Mama Spa Botanica project documents in sculpture and photography, the transgressive resilience and community justice work upheld by reproductive and climate justice leaders, along with their melanated neighbors to transform deadly statistics into fertility statues and powerful statutes.

The Linea Negra series photographs (2008-present) documents the inception of gender, power and race structures from slogans, slang, maxims and "old wives tales" to internalized, institutional violence. The works celebrate the melanin line appearing during gestation (most prominent in women of color) as a biological pieta; the first biographical mark on the procreative body and the first sign of our creative humanity.

La Cuarentena: Corona Santa (Catherine y Ines) was exhibited at Bronx River Art Center 2021 in Unbearable Fruit: Coralina Rodriguez Meyer solo show, 2023 at University of Maryland Art Gallery in Mother Molds: Coralina Rodriguez Meyer solo show and in 2024 and the nationwide traveling exhibition Body Freedom for Every Body curated by Project for Empty Space 2024-25.