Norma Xelda Jara is a Buenos Aires-based digital artist who makes brightly coloured, tapestry-like animated GIFs that layer icons, glyphs, and text into a matrix of pixelated tracery. The flat, decorative results have been described as a cross between a Sunday comic strip, a mid-1980s PC game, and an ancient Mixtec codex.
By her own account, Jara has made digital art since 2016 through the collaborative platform DADA, began selling on MakersPlace and KnownOrigin in 2019, and started working on the Tezos blockchain in June 2021.In 2017 she contributed the piece Creeps & Weirdos #85841 to Creeps & Weirdos, a collaborative Halloween-themed collection of 108 drawings by 30 artists made through DADA that launched on October 31 of that year. The collection later became the official image of the Rare Art Festival in January 2018.ArtReview profiled her in 2022 as “a chain-smoking grandmother unafraid to speak her mind”, working from a high-rise apartment in Buenos Aires. The magazine noted that, working in Argentina's inflation-wracked economy far from the traditional art world's centres, NFTs gave her a way to generate income from her art.
In her 2021 work Cryptodrama, blinking phrases warn that Tezos, Ethereum, and Bitcoin are either 'down' or 'dead', with the word 'scam' woven into the design and three pyramids evoking the criticism that NFTs are a Ponzi scheme. A meditating figure sits at the centre of the composition amid words including 'community', 'life', and 'interest'.In 2024 she was selected to represent the year 2017 in “R(Evolutionaries)”, a two-part exhibition marking a decade of blockchain art unveiled at Art Dubai Digital in partnership with Sotheby's and SuperRare.
