Mar Coria is a Mexican artist from Puerto Vallarta. She has a small shop called Fungus Fou in the center of town where she mainly sells her own art. She is in her early 20's and has long straight light brown hair and dresses in blue jean bell bottoms and a tattoo t-shirt. She paints usually small paintings on wood with enamel finish, with a circus or tattoo theme. Her father was an inventor of fairground games. She told me he invented one of the popular games with darts thrown at a board. So for most of her childhood she was around fairground people, and her father knew a number of the circus performers.

Her paintings are bright with bold colors. A face of a fortune teller peers out or another nude lady is reclining on a sofa with tattoos all over her body. Another is of a tattooed woman in a glass display case with a serpent. She told me she had seen that act at one of the circuses that she attended. She loves the allure of the circus and says that she's sad that most of the weirder acts are no longer in the circus because it costs too much to hire them, but that she still sees the weird animal shows like the double-headed donkey.

She's from Northern Mexico and she told me that her sister contacted her last month to tell her about the smallest woman that they had found in her town near a border town. I said, "How small?" and she lifted her finger and measured this lady to be about the size of one finger. "This small," she said. She thought her name was Maria. She said that the tiniest girl was in a circus act up until a few months ago because they found her crying because she was embarrassed that people were staring at her because she was so small. But then her sister said she heard that she was maybe thinking of joining the circus again.