Leah Perez

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

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)

"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.

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