AUGUST 2021
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 3
ERASING THE LINE
GIRLS MAGAZINE
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 3, AUGUST 2021
GIRLS MAGAZINE ERASING THE LINE Letter from the Editor: Page 3 Ana Briz: Page 4 Lizania Cruz: Page 9 Marcela Guerrero: Page 16 Leah Perez: Page 23 Arleene Correa Valencia: Page 28
GIRLS MISSION STATEMENT GIRLS is a revised portfolio of interviews from a nationwide community of real, strong womxn. It's a magazine that is 100% all womxn, which is beautiful in its rarity - the magazine is a safe space FOR womxn ABOUT womxn. Created by Adrianne Ramsey, it serves as a content destination for millennial womxn. Read on for an engagement of feminist voices and a collaborative community for independent girls to discover, share, and connect. The usage of the terms "girls" and "womxn" refers to genderexpansive people (cis girls, trans girls, non-binary, non-conforming, gender queer, and any girl-identified person). Front and Back Cover Image: “SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” (2020 - Ongoing) by Ana Teresa Fernandez and Arleene Correa Valencia. Courtesy of the artists
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR BY ADRIANNE RAMSEY In March 2020, a couple of days before COVID-19 lockdowns began in the U.S., I saw the first career survey of the extraordinary artist Luchita Hurtado (1920-2020) at LACMA. “I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn” featured eighty years worth of her paintings and works on paper, and was one of the best exhibitions that I've ever seen. Sadly, before her participation in the 2016 Made in L.A. Biennial at The Hammer Museum, Luchita’s career was virtually unknown and her works were in storage. The fact that this groundbreaking Latin American female artist received her first career survey at 99 years old – and she sadly passed away in August 2020 – is a perfect example of the exclusion of Latin American and Latinx artists in art institutions. The rise of Donald Trump sparked heightened conversations about the experiences of Latin American people, particularly relating to mass migration, family separation, and citizenship. Immigration from Latin American countries has been a recurring and polarizing issue in the United States, but during the Trump administration we witnessed sweeping changes to our immigration and enforcement systems. While some of those changes were sharp disconnects from the previous Obama administration, others have roots and continuities with earlier administrations. But despite immigration having been a central part of public debate in contemporary politics and policy making, it is still debated as if it were ahistorical and decontextualized. And more importantly, why did it take the election of a malignant xenophobe to demand better representation and the inclusion of Latinx people in institutions? Many Latinx artists have been investigating critical themes in their work that relate to deconstructing historical narratives and established definitions in regards to personal identity. Questions such as "How do federal, state, and local immigration policies and their linkages impact the livelihood of migrants, and what does that mean for the shaping of societal inequality?" and "How do we get rid of harmful stereotypes against Latin American and Latinx people when conservative media consistently contributes to the spread of hateful misinformation?" are being explored. In addition, art institutions desperately need to diversify their curatorial staffs and actually hire Latin American and Latinx people. Representation is vital and contributes to a more diversified programming and workspace. GIRLS 11 features female-identifying Latin American curators and artists who center on Latinx thematics in their practices. Thank you to Ana, Lizania, Marcela, Leah, and Arleene for participating in this issue and reflecting upon what we can do to create a more equitable society, especially in the arts sector!
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ANA BRIZ
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Ana Cristina Briz is a researcher, writer, and curator. Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and raised in Miami, Florida, she resides in Los Angeles, California, located in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Tongva peoples. Her research is situated in the field of performance, art, and visual culture in the United States with an emphasis on queer, feminist, and anti-racist work by BIPOC in California. She is broadly interested in issues of displacement, gentrification, mourning, and resistance in contemporary art and culture. Embodiment and the politics of identity inform her curatorial practice and research interests. Her most recent exhibitions include CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic (2020), co-curated with Alexandre Dorriz at GALLERYPLATFORM.LA; This Body Can’t Be All There Is (2020), co-curated with Johnny Forever at the USC Roski Graduate Gallery; and By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun (2019), co-curated with Star Montana at the USC Roski MFA Gallery. In partnership with the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, she develops mobile art projects with artist noé olivas in a 1967 Chevy Step-Van titled domingo. Briz is currently a Ph.D. student in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Art History from Florida International University.
Image courtesy of Mikey Enriquez
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ANA BRIZ This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in July 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator? AB: Like most people in this field, I didn’t grow up with aspirations of becoming a curator. It all started back home in Miami while completing my Bachelor’s in art history and thinking about graduate school. Amelia Jones was the first person to pose to me the question of whether I was interested in curation, and it sparked an ambition towards something I didn’t know was possible. At the time, I was interning at the newly founded ICA Miami as a docent under education and outreach, and was hopeful that I could continue to work in museums with the necessary qualifications. Soon after, I applied to the University of Southern California, got in for their Master’s in curatorial practice, and moved across the country to begin cultivating such a practice. While I was already invested in researching and writing about Latinx art, curating felt like another language to learn – full of its own people, places, histories, and methods. In many ways, USC’s curatorial program was like an immersive language program. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to learn from practicing curators, artists, writers, and theorists who impressed upon me an ethics of curation. By the end of the program, out of our own volition, artist Star Montana and I teamed up to curate her thesis show By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun (2019). It was then that I realized some of my aspirations for being a curator. Star and I worked collaboratively over many studio visits throughout the months leading up to her exhibition. She was very trusting and allowed me to make many critical curatorial decisions, including the way we decided to hang the works. [The install] was meant to abstractly mimic the composition of a hymn, essentially making each hung photograph a [musical] note. It was a huge hands-on experience, with most of us on the team being graduate students, staff members, and friends. I cannot even begin to list the beautiful lessons I got the opportunity to grow from. What I can confidently say is that because of this experience, the most important aspect of my current curatorial practice is my attention to collaboration and working closely with artists.
Installation view of Star Montana’s solo show By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun (May 24 - June 2, 2019). Image courtesy of Star Montana
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ANA BRIZ GM: How do you center on the work of under-recognized Latinx and Latin American artists, as well as Latinidad thematics, in your practice? AB: There is no better answer other than to say that it is just what I am interested in and committed to doing. The fact of the matter is that most of my community is comprised of queer artists and activists of color, and more so because I live and work in Los Angeles. Generally speaking, I tend to pay attention to what my friends and the people around me are putting out. As someone born and raised in Latin America, I always find it fascinating to learn more about the cultural similarities and differences between myself and Chicanxs in Los Angeles, or Cubans and Haitians in Miami. Often times you will find that many of the topics or thematics that artists in Los Angeles touch upon – whether we are talking about SoCal aesthetics, subcultures, or iconographies associated with Latinidad – relate to larger structural issues that should concern us all, such as gentrification and displacement, or surveillance and policing. In my research and curatorial practice, I am most committed to paying attention to these larger structural issues and how they inform various artistic practices. So rather than focusing strictly on an artist’s identity as representative of a broadly defined Latinidad, I tend to prioritize making connections that inform that artist’s membership in a particular ethno-racial community. I find this [particular] methodology to be much more rewarding and far more interesting than one that only highlights an artist’s perceived belonging to an ethnicity or race. GM: What could art spaces do to better represent Latinx and Latin American artists on a systemic and programming level? AB: I am reluctant to recommend ways that art spaces could better represent artistic practices by Latinx or Latin American artists because I do not think that all art spaces are capable of achieving this adequately. Some spaces are quite violent and exploitative, in fact. I wouldn’t recommend Latinx artists – or any minoritarian artist – show in places where they are used for cultural clout. Surely the practice of exploiting artists for their labor is not anything new. But as of more recently in the United States, the practice of exhibiting artists of color during moments of social unrest and protest has been a surefire way to quell anxiety over loss of control, while seemingly conceding to demands for representation. The ongoing pressurization on exhibition institutions by minoritarian artists can be traced back to the late 1960’s during the New York art protests. The research and writing that Bridget R. Cooks, Susan E. Cahan, Aruna D’Souza, and others have done on this topic is invaluable. One can turn to their studies on protests by Black artists and organizers before, during, and after the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, and see how protest was addressed by the organizing institution. Popular concessions, such as exhibiting a few artists of color or even acquiring their work without first addressing the violence of exclusion, are often just other ways that the museum institution maintains its power to decide what are its parameters of inclusion. Much isn’t different today. (Continued)
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ANA BRIZ
Installation view of Johnny Forever Nawracaj’s solo show This Body Can’t Be All There Is (March 12 - 18, 2020). Image courtesy of Ryan Miller, Capture Imaging
[…] Cooks said it the best in her book, Exhibiting Blackness (2011),when speaking about a racially segregated show versus a show organized as a form of self-representation: “The all-Black show has a future at mainstream art museums in the case of self-representation, which will likely focus on art from a particular formal concern or thematic focus that may or may not be centered around racial issues. Being Black is not enough of a commonality to be a platform for exhibition.” [Page 159] Cooks echoes Susette S. Min’s argument that similarly, Asian Americans cannot be accurately represented in racially segregated shows. One can easily extend this to the exhibition of Latinx artists under the troubled banner of Latinidad. There are stark differences between an all-Latinx show in someone’s backyard and an all-Latinx show at LACMA. So long story short: if art spaces want to highlight Latinx and Latin American work in any meaningful way, they must listen to the community’s wants and needs and create hospitable environments where sustained research on artistic practices by these diverse groups of people can be undertaken. And please: no more survey shows where the sole criterion is that the artist be somehow identifiable by their otherness. While those shows certainly can help uplift artists into “recognition”, they are also reductive and flatten so many of the inherent differences in these various communities. GM: Can you discuss any recent projects of yours? AB: I am currently completing my Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity; I plan to have my dissertation focus on site-specific public performance art by BIPOC in California within a larger context of performance, exhibition, and display. Outside of my academic work, I have my own practice as a curator and arts writer, and more recently as a project assistant to Star Montana. We are currently working with Los Angeles County’s Department of Arts and Culture's Civic Art Division on her mural commission for the Restorative Care Villages at the LAC+USC Medical Center. It has been incredible to be able to continue to work closely with Star as friends and long-time collaborators. Practices such as Star’s are what animate my own research and writing.
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LIZANIA CRUZ
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Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist, designer, and curator interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has been an artist-inresidence and fellow at the Laundromat Project Create Change (2017-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), Recess Session (2019), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (SIP) (2019), A.I.R. Gallery (20202021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), Center for Book Arts (2020-2021), and Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Visual Arts (2021-2022). Her work has been exhibited at the Arlington Arts Center, BronxArtSpace, Project for Empty Space, ArtCenter South Florida, Jenkins Johnson Project Space, The August Wilson Center, Sharjah’s First Design Biennale, Untitled, Art Miami Beach, and CUE Art Foundation, among others. Most recently she is part of ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at el Museo del Barrio, the first national survey of Latinx artists by the institution. Furthermore, her artworks and installations have been featured in Hyperallergic, Fuse News, KQED Arts, Dazed Magazine, Garage Magazine and The New York Times.
Image courtesy of Manolo Salas
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LIZANIA CRUZ This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in July 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming an artist? LC: I always wanted to be an artist. When I was a teenager, I was painting and had a hard time convincing my parents that I could make a living from art. I also wanted to go to Altos de Chavón School of Design in the Dominican Republic; it had an untraditional reputation, so my parents were really against me going there. I started studying advertising in a different school, and then I applied behind their backs and got in. At that time, it was hard to get in because they only accepted around 50 people and the school only had fashion design, art/illustration, and graphic design departments. So I ended up convincing my parents. The graphic design department really excited me because they were doing more conceptual things, and at that time I really didn’t know what type of artist I was. I was still developing, and the art program was very specific. They were painting and doing sculptures, but I was interested in telling stories in a different way, so I ended up switching majors and doing graphic design. I worked as a graphic designer for around 8 years, and I started working more with immigrant communities as a graphic designer trying to use design in order to talk about different oppressive systems. I was also figuring out ways to do political education through design, as well as working with organizations that were using publications and other participatory design elements in order to engage folks into organizing. From there, I started to work more on my own projects that had a similar vision, which is addressing immigration and belonging from a perspective of participation and putting people at the center. Once I started doing [artist] residencies, one thing led to another. GM: How do you center on Latinx themes and identity in your interdisciplinary practice? LC: I think of materials and processes and what will be the best approach to bring across a concept. It’s interesting because that’s just who I am – I would consider myself more of a Caribbean woman than a Latina or Latinx woman, and we can speak about those [identifying] terms and why I feel that way. I’m a lightskin Black immigrant woman [living] in the U.S. and I’m here on an artist’s visa. I have a ton of privilege within that system because I have documentation. What I try to focus on throughout my practice is thinking about plurality and how we can create more stories that address or dismantle a monolithic view of what a Latinx person or immigrant is. So I always try to think of pluralistic approaches to narratives and storytelling. I believe in a politics of differences and how we can embrace our differences in order to understand how we are interdependent.
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LIZANIA CRUZ
Installation view of Lizania Cruz's solo show In Search of Motives (April 23 - May 23, 2021). Photo by Sebastian Bach and courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery
GM: Do you want to touch on your hesitation surrounding identifiers such as “Latinx” and “Latino/a”? LC: There are a lot of conversations around identifying terms because there are so many and so many different viewpoints. I appreciate the push to make the term “Latino/a” gender inclusive and be more aware of the expansive community that is Latino/a/x. […] My whole thing with the term “Latino/a” is that it is a term that was prescribed to the region and us, rather than a term that we started ourselves. I think that the term “Latinx” is trying to move into a direction of using a term that feels more representative of the current moment in the community. But I have issues with the term “Latino/a” because of its history. [While] I belong to this larger umbrella, I feel very Caribbean at heart. GM: What could art spaces do to better represent Latinx and Latin American people on a systemic and programming level? LC: I don’t even know where to start! The thing is, a lot of the people that are represented in these high level institutions are within the selective few. The biggest step is first, how can we dismantle this idea of the selective few, and two, what are the barriers of entries that exist in these high level institutions? A huge barrier that people don’t talk a lot about is academia. Why is academia so legitimized for people to even be able to work within institutions? Not everyone can afford to go to school, and not everyone can afford to have a Master’s degree. We have to shift the way that we consider what knowledge is legitimate [enough] to be a part of an institution. When I say “knowledge”, [I’m referring to] so much knowledge in Latin American culture that is Indigenous, Afrocentric, and not rooted in the white, colonialist system that is academia. […] I know there’s a ton of talk about transparency, but we need to know where the money is coming from, who is on the staff, who is and isn’t an intern, and who’s getting paid what. Once we know the real transparency of the machine, we’ll be able to hold more people accountable.
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LIZANIA CRUZ GM: Could you talk about the work that makes up your current solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, “Lizania Cruz: Gathering Evidence: Santo Domingo & New York City” (2021)? LC: I feel super grateful because I was able to work with Guadalupe Maravilla as a curator-mentor, and it has really made me think a lot. 90% of the [exhibited] work is in Spanish, as language is a huge barrier for certain folks. I live in New York City, where Spanish is a language that you hear people speak everywhere. But it has also been really great to work with someone that [knows the] historical context of the diasporas [affected by] U.S. involvement in Latin America. I’ve been working on a project titled “Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary”, which looks at how the nation-state in the Dominican Republic created this historical narrative that has been imbedded in our identity and in the way that we share history that has repressed and erased African heritage from our identity. In this investigation, [I’m also] looking at our relationship with Haiti and how the creation of the [Dominican Republic] nation-state comes from the idea that we are not Haitian. So “other-ing” became a mechanism of creating a separation from Haiti. GM: I’m sure this wasn’t intentional on your part, but Haiti is a polarizing topic right now due to everything that went down with the recent assassination of Jovenel Moïse, President of Haiti. LC: […] I’ve been working with archives and the archival history [of the Dominican Republic] for this project. So when [the assassination] happened, so many people that know about my project texted me, “Oh my god! Can you believe this is happening?” I’m not a historian, but once you start working with the archive, you see how history repeats itself over and over again. I feel that this project really looks at how the history of the Dominican Republic has been constructed by those in power to specifically address a creation of an identity, as well as separate that identity from Haiti. These are folks that we have roots with because we were on this island together and we fought colonialism together in many instances. (Continued)
"¡Se Buscan Testigos! [Looking for Witnesses!]" (2020-2021) by Lizania Cruz. Courtesy of the artist and CUE Art Foundation
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LIZANIA CRUZ It’s incredible to me that we’re at the point where, by law, Dominican’s were de-nationalized because of their Haitian descent. So the project is specifically about all that. It’s been super nice to see the show come together because I worked on a lot of the pieces in both Santo Domingo and here in New York City, so this is the first time I’ve seen the work together in conversation. A lot of my work happened in the public space, so this exhibition is the first time where I was able to not only do an action in the public space, but also think about all the documentation that happens within an action. The central piece to the exhibition is "¡Se Buscan Testigos! [Looking for Witnesses!]" (2020-2021), where I did a campaign in both the Dominican Republic and New York City. I pasted signs throughout the places that asked very specific questions, such as, “What do you know about enslaved people in the Dominican Republic?” “Did you know that mangú was popularized in the Dominican Republic by enslaved Black people?” “What do you believe is the true story you learned in school about Christopher Columbus?” People could respond through WhatsApp via a phone number. I made a video that showed the signs all throughout the streets, and then I made an app with a creative technologist. [The exhibition is] multifaceted and what’s in the gallery is the posters, video of the documentation, and then visitors can scan a QR code and see all the testimonies through a phone app. There’s another [exhibited] piece that I’ve been working on for a year and am showing for the first time called “The Plaintiffs Records” (2021). It’s a series of books, each comprised of 10,000 pages, and is in reference to La Sentencia, the 2013 law that retroactively revoked the citizenship of Dominican’s of Haitian descent. There’s an edition of twenty books; each page represents a revoked birth certificate, and in some of the books there’s a bookmark with a QR code that allows visitors to read a story written by a person affected by La Sentencia. For this piece, I partnered with We Are All Dominican (WAAD) here in NYC and Reconoci.do in the "The Plaintiffs Records" (2021) by Lizania Cruz. Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation
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Dominican Republican, two groups that organize folks that have been affected by La Sentencia.
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LIZANIA CRUZ GM: Did the past presidential administration’s xenophobic and racist laws against people from Latin American countries, especially immigrants, affect your practice? LC: Yeah, of course! There was a sense of urgency that definitely pushed a lot of the things that I was thinking about and focusing on. One of my first public art projects, “Flowers for Immigration” (2016 – 2020), was actually a specific project around views on U.S. immigration rhetoric. I started the project when Trump was campaigning to be president. […] I honestly don’t think we’re done with the Trump era. What Trump did that was unfortunately so powerful was shift public opinion and public discourse – he gave space for people that were having feelings similar to his but were silent about it. These people are now empowered to do the things that they’re doing now. We’ll have to see what ultimately happens, because all the systems in place – the media, [U.S.] Congress – fuel Trump. We’ve turned a corner, but we’re still in the beginning stages.
"The American Dream" (2021) by Lizania Cruz, as part of "Obituaries of the American Dream". Installation view in ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at el Museo del Barrio, March 13 - September 26, 2021. Courtesy of the artist
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MARCELA GUERRERO
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Marcela Guerrero is the Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recently, she was part of the curatorial team that organized Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945. In summer 2018, Guerrero curated the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. From 2014 to 2017 she worked as Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she was involved in the much-lauded exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, organized as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative and guest-curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta. Along with Fajardo-Hill, Guerrero curated the show’s selection of Latina and Chicana artists and has written the catalogue chapter on Caribbean women artists, along with more than sixty biographical entries. Prior to her position at the Hammer, she worked in the Latin American and Latino Art Curatorial department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), where she served as Research Coordinator for the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). In this role, she was in charge of reviewing, vetting, and publishing primary and secondary sources on the ICAA’s digital archive “Documents of 20th -Century Latin American and Latino Art”. At the MFAH she also participated in the acquisition of artworks from the Caribbean region for the permanent collection. Guerrero’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications including ArtNexus, Diálogo, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Intransit, and Gulf Coast, and has contributed articles to numerous exhibition catalogues. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Guerrero received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, and holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of WisconsinMadison. Image courtesy of Javier Romero
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MARCELA GUERRERO This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in June 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming a curator, as well as your current job at The Whitney Museum? MG: I’m originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. When I was [in college] studying history, I came to Hunter College in New York for an exchange program. I took a couple of art history classes and fell in love with it. I decided that if I was going to go to graduate school, I was going to study art history. I was doing a PhD and was at a point where I had defended my dissertation proposal, but I didn’t want to be tied to Madison, Wisconsin. So I thought that I could see what a career in museums was like. I applied for a research job at the MFA Houston, which was cool because it allowed me to do research but also get into curatorial work. I did that for three years and I then moved to the Hammer Museum, where I worked as a Curatorial Fellow for the “Radical Women” exhibition. That was a great experience being a junior curator in that institution and getting a glimpse of exactly what I wanted – MFA Houston is big, encyclopedic institution and the Hammer is more mid-size and contemporary. I worked with two guest curators and it took a lot of diplomacy being the person in the middle advocating for the needs of the exhibition to the Hammer – so resources and budgets, and communicating to the curators about the Hammer’s protocols and approvals. […] Another part of this experience was that I was a Curatorial Fellow under the PST umbrella, so I questioned what was going to happen after the exhibition opened. I talked to Naima Keith, who was the Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer for the exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 - 1980” (2011-2012). Naima had an incredible career after her fellowship; she went on to The Studio Museum, then CAAM, and now LACMA. I met with her when she was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at CAAM and she gave me great advice: “Don’t worry about leaving the Hammer if you see another good opportunity. Go for it, and once you get that opportunity, stay there for 3 years and then move on to the next thing.” Which is really great advice for people who are just starting out and getting settled into a job. There was an open position at the Whitney and I applied; they said they wanted someone with Latinx expertise. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on Jackson Pollock or Edward Hopper, that’s not who I am. During 2015 2016 there was a real interest in Latinx art specifically. I was lucky to be at that moment in my career where I was ready to take the next step, and the people at the Whitney wanted to create a position that looked at that area of our program and our collection that had been understudied and underrepresented. GM: How do you center on the work of under-recognized Latinx and Latin American artists in your curatorial practice? MG: Starting July 1st, I’ll be [the Jennifer Rubio] Associate Curator at The Whitney. Our role as curators is to create exhibitions and acquire works for the collection. When I joined the museum, I knew that they hadn’t been consistently representing Latinx artists. There [is a large] amount of work that one has to do to represent this expansive group of people that are not a monolith and vary a lot depending on the city where they are. (Continued)
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MARCELA GUERRERO
Installation view of Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Ronny Quevedo, ULAMA-ULE-ALLEY OOP, 2017; Ronny Quevedo, Errant Globe, 2015; Ronny Quevedo, Field of Play, 2016; Ronny Quevedo, Cabeza Magica, 2012. Photograph by Ron Amstutz and courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art
I met with Thelma Golden, who gave me great advice from when she curated "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art" (1994) at The Whitney. She wanted to represent her generation, and I thought that that made a lot of sense [for me] in terms of the artists and their ideas that I’m gravitating towards. So I decided to lean into that idea of working with artists of my generation and pitched a group exhibition titled “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay; Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art”, featuring seven early and mid-career Latinx artists based in the U.S. who looked at ideas of architecture, their family backgrounds, and their Latin American backgrounds, specifically Indigenous inspiration. That was overall a great experience in knowing that I had the support of the institution. There was a lot of support in terms of resources, and six of the featured artists are now in the collection. We’ve been increasing our works by Latinx artists in the collection at a pretty speedy rate. The Whitney was founded in 1930 and 40% of the collected works by Latinx artists were acquired in the last 5 years. So there’s a lot of wok to do. […] I’m currently working on a group show of intergenerational Puerto Rican artists and a solo project; hopefully in the future I’ll do a mid or late-career solo exhibition, but it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. I feel good in that I’ve been doing the best that I can for my single position as the one curator here to present and support Latinx artists as much as I can. GM: What could art spaces do to better engage with Latinx art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and diversifying collections? MG: Yesterday, I listened to a conversation with David Evans Frantz and C. Ondine Chavoya, the two curators of “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.” – this show has been traveling everywhere for years. They were told many times that there wasn’t an audience for this show or a market for the catalogue. And that was so wrong; many of the institutions that took a chance [on the exhibition] were academic museums. (Continued)
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MARCELA GUERRERO […] I’m currently working with an artist, Martine Gutierrez. If you look at her exhibition history and the collections where her work is, it’s mostly academic museums that took a chance on a trans female artist who is playing very tongue-in-cheek with appropriation, identity, fashion, and editorial. I think that bigger institutions should take a note from more experimental spaces or take a chance [on artists and thematics] that they think there isn’t an audience for, especially Latinx art. Don’t assume that you know what the audience is from the get go, it’s not what they think it is. GM: Can you discuss your experience working on “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985” (2017) at The Hammer Museum? MG: That was a huge exhibition. It was experimental in the sense that you don’t [often] see exhibitions featuring 100 artists. Showing 1-2 works by an artist and writing about them in the catalogue spurred young scholars to write dissertations and created a scholarship around many of the [featured] artists. Many of them were unknown when we started [working on] the exhibition, and still are because the interest hasn’t picked up for all of them. In hindsight there were things that could’ve been done better, or earlier – the idea of adding Latina artists [based in the United States] was not a part of the original conception for the show. This ended up being good representation for those artists. But the way that the exhibition was originally conceived would’ve only featured artists from Latin America. So someone like Judy Baca, who lives just a couple of miles from [the Hammer] wouldn’t have originally been apart of the exhibition. Which is strange for Los Angeles, but then again, LA institutions like the Hammer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and LACMA are not really known for their deep engagement with Latinx artists. That’s something we realized and fortunately were able to correct.
"The Power of Words" gallery. From left to right: Marie Orensanz, Límites (Limits), 1979, Limitada (Limited), 1978/2013, and Pensar es un hecho revolucionario (Thinking is a revolutionary act), 1974, and Lenora de Barros, Poema (Poem), 1979. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960– 1985. September 15–December 31, 2017. Photo: Brian Forrest and courtesy of The Hammer Museum
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MARCELA GUERRERO GM: What was your experience co-curating “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925 – 1945” (2020-2021) at The Whitney Museum? MG: If I thought that “Radical Women” was a big show, it was incredible to see the amount of resources that can be put behind an exhibition. “Vida Americana” was a different exhibition in the sense that it took a lot more [effort]. For example, securing loans – when you’re working with emerging artists, you either get the works from the artists themselves or their galleries, and it’s pretty simple. But when you’re talking about works that are in the national patrimony of countries, in this case Mexico, you’re almost a diplomat. It wasn’t emailing someone to lend us a Diego Rivera work. We had to go [to Mexico], show our faces for them to see who we were, [explain] what the thesis of the show was – it was intense! In that sense, I’m grateful for the opportunity because I saw Barbara Haskell, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Whitney who has years of experience, and she would not back down. She would think of every possible option to feature the works, and that was impressive to see in real time. In terms of the thesis of the show, and really anything that upends American exceptionalism, I’m all for that. “Vida Americana” was an exhibition that tried to retell an early chapter of American art history; that uber men like Jackson Pollock are not these geniuses, that’s a myth. Every artist is a reflection of their time, the people, and the network that they’re around. Two examples of artists whose work we looked at in terms of the elements and aspects from the Mexican artists that [Pollock] took from were José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, in order to really give credit where it’s due. These artists, as complicated as they and their rhetoric was in terms of aligning with a communist ideology, but at the same time accepting commissions from uber capitalists, is still kind of the way the arts manifests, at least in this country. (Continued)
Installation view of Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 17-May 17, 2020). From left to right: Diego Rivera, Study for Colonial America, from Portrait of America, c. 1933; Diego Rivera, Reproduction of Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934; Hugo Gellert, Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together (The Last Defenses of Capitalism), 1932; Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1932. Photograph by Ron Amstutz and courtesy of The Whitney Museum of
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MARCELA GUERRERO
Image courtesy of Javier Romero
Some artists tend to be very left leaning and forward thinking, but at the end of the day, institutions are funded by people who are making money that, on a personal level, one may not agree with. I’m saying this to emphasize that these issues that we saw in the 1930’s are still prevalent today. Another interesting aspect of “Vida Americana”, which premiered right before COVID, was when we re-opened in fall 2020; there was this awareness that if the government doesn’t step up and help artists, what’s going to happen to art and culture? Right after we re-opened we could hear rumblings about if there should be another WPA. So it was really nice to see those parallels between the 1930’s and almost a century later. GM: Did the last presidential administration’s xenophobic and racist laws against people from Latin American countries, especially immigrants, affect your practice? MG: By the mere fact of being in this container that is the U.S., one has to contend with the constant politics of legislating for rights. This is true for many Latinx groups, whether it’s Mexican Americans in Arizona who, just a couple of years ago, were getting [their] books burned, or laws like Proposition 227 from 1998 being passed in California that prohibited Spanish language being taught in schools. In a way, the previous president was extreme perhaps, but I’m always ignited in my work by this constant wish to champion artists who are showing a different version of stereotypes against Latinos. This became imperative during the years of 2016 - 2020.
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LEAH PEREZ
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Leah Perez is a curator based in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in Contemporary Latino and Latin American Studies from the University of Southern California. She is currently pursuing her MA in Curatorial Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design. Her curatorial interests lie at the intersection of art and ethnic culture, specifically contemporary and historical aesthetics of Black and brown communities in Los Angeles. Perez is interested in challenging the precarious definition of Latinidad, thereby prioritizing decolonial practices that emphasize queer, Indigenous, Black, and brown Latinxs in the United States. Embracing the aesthetics of rasquache as a visual language of U.S. Latinxs -- imagery that in a colonial context is referred to as chunti, or naco -- Perez considers how brown and Black artists use their bodies to engage with issues of labor, machismo, homophobia. Perez is interested in performance and body art as ways of engaging with how the criminalization of Black and brown bodies works in the context of Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection. Perez recently collaborated with artist José Guadalupe Sánchez II for the UTA Artist Space virtual show entitled In Cahoots: Artists and Curators at USC Roski. Sánchez’s multi-media paintings and video recordings engage with mourning, loss, and forgiveness, investigating how brown men deal with grief, in light of his own father’s passing. In collaboration with Roski alumna Ana Briz, she co-authored the interview, Giving Image to an Afro–Future with Lauren Halsey for Flash Art Magazine.
Image courtesy of Ahmad Kabbani
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LEAH PEREZ This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in June 2021. GM: What has been your path to becoming a curator? LP: I’ve honestly loved art my whole life. My mom has this anecdote of me going to a museum at three years old and talking about Monet and his lily paintings. I did my undergrad in Latinx Studies, and through that I came to the conclusion that Latinx people are really underrepresented, not just in general media but especially the arts. I’m really interested in queer Latinidad, which is even more under looked. Through [my studies] I became really interested in uncovering these people and figures whose Latinist and queerness has been erased from history. A good example is the case of Felix Gonzalez-Torres: accents aren’t allowed in his name by his estate. Different figures like that mean a lot to me and are what truly inspired me to pursue this career path. GM: How do you center on the work of under-recognized Latinx and Latin American artists, as well as Latinidad thematics, in your practice? LP: Part of including underrepresented Latinx artists is this push to include art that’s generally not accepted in a museum. For example, the art of Chicano tattooing, or drag art, or street art such as tagging, are things that we need to accept into a visual canon of Latin art in order to highlight those underrepresented people. For example, Chicano fine lining came from inmates who had a lack of resources for tattooing, so they used what they had to create tattoos. I think about these aesthetics that come out of survival or struggles. It’s a way of appreciating a wider umbrella of folks who didn’t have access to a traditional art education, or still don’t have access to being accepted in a museum or the white space gallery. GM: What could art spaces do to better represent Latinx and Latin American artists on a systemic and programming level? LP: The hiring has to come from within. You have to have Latinx curators of different ethnic groups, countries, and colors. I’m Chicana and I love Chicanx art, but we have a lot of Central Americans, Belizeans, and Afro-Latinx who live in Los Angeles and are super overlooked. We need to have Latinx people in the museum period, but it needs to be much more intersectional and intentional. There are certain Latinx artists and artists of color in general that white people love. But if they’re not within the community, then they have no context for them. (Continued)
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LEAH PEREZ
"Giving Image to an Afro-Future" by Ana Briz and Leah Perez, Flash Art Magazine, Issue #333 (Winter 2020-21). Photo by and courtesy of Leah Perez
It’s something that I grew up with, like going to the swap meet, driving past a mural, or seeing people tag or write that little “S” on their folders. It’s things like that that made me realize that if you don’t have the language for it, then you’ll never be able to teach someone else. I’ve worked in programming and it’s the same thing, you need to have somebody who is of that community to be able to speak to and advocate for that community. Not just say, “Oh, we’re having a culture day for free!” But how are people from that culture going to get there? Are they going to have a ride to the museum? Are they going to even know about it? So really thinking about the community, how it’s run, and how to access them and make yourself accessible to them as well. GM: Can you discuss a recent project of yours? LP: Personally, what I’m really interested in is the aesthetics of Latinidad and what that means. My MA thesis will pursue how the baroque aesthetic was created collaboratively between the old world and the new world, and how baroque excess not only lives on in the visual canon of Latinidad, but also from things that are bodied. I’m also thinking about how that excess works into the Latin body, so a brown body being seen as “spicy” and “exotic”. I’m very much in the early works of my thesis and have started my reading list for it.
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LEAH PEREZ GM: Did the last presidential administration’s xenophobic and racist laws against people from Latin American countries, especially immigrants, affect your practice? LP: When Trump was elected, my mentality was, “I’m going to be me, no matter what and even louder than I’ve been doing me. I’m going to be brown no matter what. I’m going to be a woman no matter what.” Obviously there are all these laws against immigration, laws targeting brown and Black people, and laws that cut funding to the arts. So I think that that has motivated me to realize that there’s an even greater need for [my practice] than there was prior. I’m a citizen and a documented person, so it didn’t affect me in any particular way where I was made to feel especially unsafe. It was just a very frustrating and emotional time. So more than anything, I was motivated to be an ally to those who were especially affected by the Trump administration.
"Lucia" (2020) by José Guadalupe Sánchez II, acrylic and cellophane on wood panel. Featured as part of the virtual exhibition In Cahoots: Artists and Curators at USC Roski, UTA Artists Space, premiered December 3, 2020. Courtesy of UTA Artists Space
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA
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Arleene Correa Valencia is a Mexican artist living and working in Napa, California. In 2020 she received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Correa Valencia was awarded a regional Emmy award for her feature "REPRESENT" by KQED Arts. She is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which she has used to work and study since 2012. Correa Valencia is one of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family migrated to the United States in 1997 and established themselves in California’s wine country, Napa Valley. Her upbringing and migration narrative are the inspiration behind her practice which she uses to explore her identity as a registered “illegal alien.”
Image courtesy of Julia Kokernak
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in June 2021. GM: What was your path to becoming an artist? ACV: I think part of what makes my work so powerful and special is that I talk about my family, my own history, and my relationship with my father a lot. I am a Mexican immigrant and grew up in a low-income household. Access to the arts is very limited for undocumented people of color, but my father always had an eye for art and color theory. One of his very first jobs when he came to the United States was being a house painter, and regardless of his limitations of not having access to fine art or paintings, he always implemented this notion that we had to be connected to paint. I grew up in a household where we had to be connected to understanding the colors of the Earth, the patterns between colors, and the color of our skin. So I’ve always had a passion for really devoting my life to this idea of art. As I grew older, I realized that I had something to say in terms of who I am in this country and who the government and certain administrations have made me out to be. Being undocumented has played a huge role in limiting my education. I graduated from high school, but didn’t have access to higher education because I was not yet a Dreamer and didn’t have a social security number. I single handedly paid for Napa Valley College, where I took every single painting or art class because I was so infatuated with becoming an artist and expressing myself. Eventually, Obama signed DACA into law, and with that I was able to apply to art school. I went to CCA and had a really hard time coming out as undocumented. It felt like this big reveal of who I was. But I realized it was really what I needed to do in order to have some peace of mind and some understanding of who I am, as well as a release of shame. So I got rid of this cloak that I had been wearing - hiding myself, feeling less than, wanting to be invisible all because I was drenched in this “undocumented” shame. We feel like we commit a crime every single day because we’re here illegally. So the trajectory of me becoming an artist really came from my father planting the seed in [my family] and hoping that we would see the world in a different way, as well as be being a curious, adventurous person. GM: Why is your specific medium a powerful way for you to amplify your identity? ACV: I wanted so badly be an oil painter because I thought that if I mastered this European idea of the translation of our reality, then I would be the greatest and would be successful. I really pushed for that, but I never felt connected to my ancestors or myself [through that]. About two years ago, I dove into really understanding ancestral practices of embroidery, textiles, sewing, and the history that Latinx women have played in fashion and textiles. My mother-in-law, who is from El Salvador, is an amazing artist who does these incredible embroideries and knows all about the sewing machine. I considered her my point of reference because I felt that I needed to learn these practices. (Continued)
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA The textiles from my people and Salvadorian people are very similar, as we all come from the same lineage of Native people. After talking with her, I started to put things together in terms of breaking apart fabrics that carry so much of our energy. I took my family’s old clothing and started cutting it up. It was essentially repurposing clothing and thinking about this idea of recycling energies, and taking apart fragments of each of my siblings and my parents, and putting them back together to create these large textiles that became portraitures of my family. GM: Are these portraits what you’re currently working on? ACV: Yes. I’ve been talking about families being torn apart through the use of glow in the dark thread. Essentially, the children in these images disappear and the parents appear, and when the children appear, the parents disappear. There’s a really big play on visibility, who gets to be in the limelight, and when. If we’re looking at my portraits in a completely dark room, you’ll only be able to see children. But if we allow light to come in, you’ll see the parents with the outline of a child.
There are all these layers of investigating the relationship between child and parent, which is really important to me because I came to the United States at three years old. There’s a large conversation to be had about migrating families and the separation that occurs at the border. These portraits are the most honest and raw part of myself and my family in a way that doesn’t reveal identity, nor adopt this Eurocentric idea of art. It’s genuine to the history of my ancestors and my family, and it’s all about love and the continuation of our existence through our children. I’m really proud of it and feel that it’s my best work so far.
"The River That Sings" (2021) by Arleene Correa Valencia, repurposed fabric on black canvas. Courtesy of the artist
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA GM: How do you center on Latinx themes in your practice? ACV: One of my goals in my practice is to make sure that there’s a moment of reflection in seeing our resilience and our power. So much of the media and the arts focuses on these negative ideas of who we are, what we do, or what the world thinks we’ve come to do in this country. Some of those are misconceptions and appropriations of others speaking on behalf of the migrant. For example, a white person discussing the migrant experience [of a person of color]. That’s where the mistranslation happens; instead of honoring who we are, we have this perpetuation of stereotypes. We see Home Depot workers and instead of amplifying their voices or celebrating who they are, we’re perpetuating this idea that we’ve come here only as laborers and only as these people who are waiting for an opportunity. We’re more than our labor and not just a tool for this country, we’re human beings! If we don’t see people from a genuine and honest perspective, then we’re only perpetuating negative stereotypes, which doesn’t do any good for our children or future generations. For me, these themes come from my heart and wanting to express my experience. GM: What could art spaces do to better represent Latinx and Latin American artists on a systemic and programming level? ACV: I’ve been asked in the past to join boards and committees of local arts organizations. In my opinion, they want some “diversity”, and that gets problematic really quickly because then I become the point of reference for all Latinx people, as well as tokenized! (Continued)
"Mexicali" (1997) by Arleene Correa Valencia, repurposed clothing on black canvas with glow in the dark thread, True
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Farm, Charlottesville, Virginia. Courtesy of the artist
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA I haven’t trusted any of these institutions that came out with “Black Lives Matter” support statements [during the summer 2020 protests] because in my head I’m thinking, “Where have you been?” People of color have been working in these institutions and have been trying to make changes, and you haven’t listened to us. So now when there’s a social movement you want to jump on board? Now you want to claim you’ve been supporting POC this whole time? No, that’s absolute bullshit. […] A couple of years ago, I was brought in to give advice on how to diversify an institution, and the first thing I suggested was language accessibility. You can’t expect brown people to come into a space where they can’t read a single word. If “welcome” does not say “bienvenidos”, then nobody is going to come in, especially when you’re talking about communities of undocumented Latinx people. And the response was that they didn’t have the budget to change the signs, and I questioned why I was even there. These sorts of things are so frustrating; I’m at the point in my career where I cannot be the point of reference for undocumented people of color because I’ve had it. As women of color especially, we have to make our voices so much stronger and demand things. It’s taken me such a long time to find power in my own voice and understand that it's okay to decline things because I feel uncomfortable, or because the person requesting is white and in more power than me. Taking a stance on our beliefs and demanding the bare minimum for ourselves is so important. GM: What was your experience participating in the 2020 YBCA exhibition, “Come To Your Census: Who Counts in America?” It was originally an in-person exhibition, but due to COVID pivoted into a digital experience. ACV: There were two components to my involvement with the exhibition. My glow in the dark portraits were in the physical exhibition that was never seen by anyone! (Laughs) I did the other component with my friend, Ana Teresa Fernandez; we created the “SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” hoodies, which we used as an incentive to target communities of color and undocumented communities all over the Bay Area to register them for the 2020 U.S. Census. We asked people if they had signed up [for the census], and if they didn’t know what it was, we educated them and they signed up right then and there. Then we gifted them these hoodies, which have bright, bold colors that reflect construction wear colors. Ana Teresa and I thought of how to use the colors of labor to empower visibility in communities of color and go against this idea that undocumented people of color are invisible or living in the shadows. We spun that and said that we were going to be visible in the census. There were these beautiful moments where people wanted to be visible, but they lacked the information or didn’t know how to read or write. (Continued)
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA
“SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” (2020Ongoing) by Ana Teresa Fernandez and Arleene Correa Valencia, Morenita Market, Napa, California. Courtesy of the artists
So they would hand us their ID’s, and we became these tools of accessibility and the driving force for getting these people counted in the census. For me, that was the most empowered I’d ever felt in my work, because it’s one thing to make a painting and see it go out in the world, but it’s another to know that you’re doing something important in physically bringing in money for communities of color that are so underfunded. Ana Teresa and I were just on the ground running, and we didn’t stop until the census was officially over, even with the Trump administration trying to end it early. […] We’re working on different iterations of the project now, but the hoodies have been embraced by a lot of people and can be used as a catalyst to dismantle this idea that invisibility defines our identities. But I do love that I was a part of an exhibition that never got viewed; it’s one of those COVID stories that we’ll tell our grandchildren! (Laughs)
“SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” (2020Ongoing) by Ana Teresa Fernandez and Arleene Correa Valencia, Napa Vineyards, California. Courtesy of the artists
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ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA
Image courtesy of Reilin Serrano
GM: Did the past presidential administration’s xenophobic and racist laws against people from Latin American countries, especially immigrants, affect your practice? ACV: Obviously, Trump did far more damage than Obama did. But when we look at the impact that both administrations had on Latinx people and migration, I don’t think that one is better than the other. Obama is responsible for so many deportations, began family separation, and was the beginning of children in cages. I will stand by that criticism [of him], regardless of him giving me DACA, because it’s not about me. My practice and everything that I do is about community and making sure that we all are represented, not just myself. Although I do have DACA, I feel like it’s at the cost of hundreds of thousands of other people that, like my parents, will never have an opportunity to seek a pathway to citizenship. I personally live with this guilt of feeling like I was gifted an opportunity at the cost of blood, sweat, and tears of other people, and to me, that’s not fair. Obviously, I took it and I ran with it, and it’s why I’m here today and have so much success, so I’m grateful. […] It’s extremely stressful to think about where the money will come from to renew my permit every two years, and when Trump was in office, [that worry started happening] every other month. We wondered if we were going to be able to renew or not, if we would get deported, and if we would have a job, or if our jobs would terminate us because we wouldn’t have a legal permit anymore. I was in graduate school and wondering if they were going to take my scholarship away because I wouldn’t be able to renew my permit. Obviously Trump had more a negative personal impact on my life, which then affects the work. I’m not at all defending Trump because I think that he is by far the absolute worst human being on the face of the planet, but the reality is that he was just fearless in expressing his sentiment for people of color. But I’m more wary of someone like Obama, who played us so hard. When you have any administration that is focused on power, money, and capitalism, there is a lack of humanity and empathy. For people of color, Obama was a huge deal; I get that and totally support that. I’m grateful that he was in office because I have what I have today because of him, but it comes at such a cost that is so painful.
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AUGUST 2021
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 3
ERASING THE LINE
GIRLS MAGAZINE
