Ana Briz

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

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

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)

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.