CATALOG DiverseLA

DIVERSEartLA Retrospective 8 years

LA ART SHOW

Curator Marisa Caichiolo

KASSANDRA VOYAGIS

LA Art Show Producer/ Director

In 2017, DIVERSEartLA was conceived as a platform devoted to nurturing the creative energy of international collectors, artists, curators, museums and non-profits by connecting them directly with audiences in Los Angeles. Since then, it has become synonymous with the LA Art Show, establishing a position of key significance for the show and the art community.

Over the last eight years, we have collaborated with many museums and non-profit art institutions from all over the world to present projects that create awareness and stimulate discussion around topics and issues that concern us all. Through installations, interactive experiences, and thought-provoking artworks, visitors have been challenged to consider solutions and positive action to social, cultural and environmental questions facing us as a society.

This timeline encapsulates the spirit of DIVERSEartLA. As producer and director of the show, I am extremely proud of how this programming section has grown and evolved under the amazing curatorial leadership of Marisa Caichiolo. DIVERSEartLA continues to break new ground through civic engagement and inclusivity.

Kassandra Voyagis Producer-Director

DIVERSEartLA:

A Celebration of Community

DIVERSEartLA is a curated, non-commercial platform dedicated to community engagement, fostering meaningful connections among museums, art institutions, non-profit organizations, and the broader public attending the Art Fair.

Formally established in 2017, DIVERSEartLA emerged from years of programmatic efforts at the fair, focusing on non commercial area for performances and installations. Recognizing the importance of this curated section, we have enhanced connections with the general public, local and international arts institutions, artists, and media. Our goal is deeply rooted in promoting collaboration and dialogue within the art community, ensuring that diverse voices and narratives are acknowledged, celebrated, and resonate.

As the curator of DIVERSEartLA for the past eight years, I have sought to illuminate the multifaceted perspectives of social and political artworks that reflect the pressing issues of our time.

It is with great honor that I announce the 2025 DIVERSEartLA Retrospective—a landmark curatorial project commemorating the 30th anniversary of the LA Art Show. This retrospective will serve as a comprehensive survey of DIVERSEartLA’s remarkable journey over the years, in collaboration with some of the most prestigious museums and art institutions, both local and international. Notable partners include The Broad, LACMA, MOLAA, the Nevada Art Museum, the MUSA Museum of Art, and the UCLA Chicano Research Institute, among many others.

MARISA CAICHIOLO

DIVERSEartLA Chief Curator

The exhibition will feature thoughtfully curated installations, an extensive catalog, and a grand timeline meticulously showcasing the diverse projects undertaken by our affiliated museums and arts institutions. Each piece will not only spotlight artistic endeavors but also reflect the collaborative spirit that defines DIVERSEartLA. By presenting a strong body of works, performances, and installations, this retrospective will encapsulate our platform’s unwavering commitment to inclusivity and innovation.

This exhibition transcends mere celebration; it represents a critical inquiry into the impact DIVERSEartLA has had within the broader art community. It honors the creative contributions of our partners and highlights the vibrant evolution of DIVERSEartLA as an indispensable presence in the cultural landscape.

By emphasizing the dynamic interplay between various artistic expressions and community engagement, we aspire to inspire future generations of artists, curators, and art enthusiasts.

We warmly invite all to join us in this celebration—not only to reflect on our past but also to envision the future of community-driven art initiatives.

More than never before, because of the current situation in the world, we can cultivate together a rich cultural dialogue that empowers diverse voices and fosters a more inclusive art world, ensuring that the transformative power of art continues to resonate across communities.

Through this retrospective, we reaffirm our commitment to shaping a future where art acts as a bridge, connecting individuals and communities in profound and meaningful ways.

Marisa Caichiolo Chief-Curator

ART OF ACTION

The curatorial focus was centered on the body that emerges as a potent social and political statement, serving as a medium for impactful commentary.

This edition was about the profound ways in which performance artists utilize their own bodies to challenge societal norms and provoke thought, transforming personal and collective experiences into powerful artistic expressions. Performance artists often blur the boundaries between art and everyday life by incorporating non-traditional materials into their works. By using everyday objects such as meat, dirt, snow, and their, furniture, these artists create a new context for their performances, inviting audiences to reconsider the nature of art itself.

This approach not only democratizes the art-making process but also emphasizes the interconnectedness of life and art. Through these explorations, performance artists seek to dismantle preconceived notions about artistic expression, generating a dialogue that resonates deeply with contemporary issues.

LACMA

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Artist: RAPHAEL MONTAÑEZ ORTIZ

Projects: Piano Destruction Ritual: Cowboy and Indian, Part Two Couch Destruction: Angel Release (Pennies from Heaven). Shred Your Worries part of FRAGMENTS FROM HOME.

Curator: Chon Noriega

Fragments From Home, a preview of Home So Different, So Appealing

Part of the 2017 Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/L A

THE WORK

There is Passive ART and Active ART. Active ART requires you to participate.

PIANO DESTRUCTION RITUAL: COWBOY AND INDIAN, PART TWO

Participatory Performance. Background Sound Thunder and Lighting. The Piano is a powerful instrument of sound to convey the message of Sacrifice I wish to convey to the Universe. The Sounds of its Destruction gives full voice to Sacrifice: To the Destruction Creation in it cycle of Creation is giving us time to understand the preciousness of Mortal Life that it never be given up to or for Sacrifice of any kind... If we must have WAR send our PIANOS to WAR. If we must have VIOLENCE send our PIANOS to VIOLENCE, I dare YOU to HATE your PIANO to fill it with your HATE and BIGOTRY and Let Creation Know your PIANO’S Life does not compare to the Miracle of Life WE MORTALS are and that OUR PIANO is the SACRIFICE TO THAT FACT... As for the Egg and the Feathers they are the subtle aspect the preparation for the SPIRITUL BONDING with the PIANO: The Egg when it is held gently in one’s cupped hands and You imagine the worst aspects of Your Character and then crush the Egg on the PIANO you have committed Yourself to the surrender of those worst aspects to the Sacrifice the PIANO is... The Feathers placed on top of the crushed Egg are the signal to the Angels to carry the Sacrifice to a place of Spiritual Redemption.

COUCH DESTRUCTION: ANGEL RELEASE (PENNIES FROM HEAVEN)” AS DESCRIBED BY THE ARTIST

An Upholstered Couch sits with a digital projection of a Guardian Angel onto the Couch, held there by the Auric Energy of the family that relaxed in the Couch for many years. Trapped by the Guardian Angel’s devotion to the family’s Auric Energy absorbed in the stuffing of the furniture, the Guardian Angel can only be released from the Couch by a Destruction. The performance begins by the creation of a Salt Circle

around the Circular Arena within which the Couch will be destroyed to release the Angel. Persons in the Audience participate in the Freeing of the Guardian Angel Couch.

SHRED YOUR WORRIES PART OF FRAGMENTS FROM HOME

course you can look at the SHREDDER like it’s an appropriated or found object. You can listen to it SHRED as if it were a John Cage Concert. Or you can participatefeeling insecure and vulnerable. These are times that make one weary, even afraid... But staying afraid, staying weary is not the Answer... Start by taking a sheet of paper and writing: I WILL STOP BEING AFRAID / I WILL STOP BEING WEARY / I WILL SHRED MY FEAR / The Shredder serves us, it protects us. When we shred something it releases us from I WILL SHRED MY WEARINESS... INSERT the sheet in the SHREDDER. LISTEN TO THE FEAR AND WEARINESS SHRED AWAY.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Active as an artist since the mid-1950s, Raphael Montañez Ortiz has produced a body of work that spans seven decades and a similar number of distinct modes and forms: painting, recycled films, sculpture, music, installation, guerrilla theater, performance, and computer art. His work resides in major permanent collections, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, London’s Tate, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. It was collected early on by arts patron Dominique de Menil and Dada cofounder Richard Huelsenbeck; and Ortiz’s performance inspired Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, known for its use of the “primal scream” in therapy sessions and for John Lennon and Yoko Ono as early adopters. In 1969 he founded the first Latino art museum, El Museo del Barrio.

DIVERSEartLA

Artist: CARLOS MARTIEL

Performance: Cauce/Riverbed

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

In his work “Cauce/Riverbed,” the artist exposes the significant challenges faced by immigrants in California and the larger United States. Martiel digs deep into the nature of undocumented immigration and shows how it impacts the lives of some eleven million individuals and their families in the world’s most powerful nation.

His performance is a window to the human tragedy that grossly affects immigrants with low-education levels and limited English language skills, who come to the United States risking their lives as they venture into the dangerous desert in an attempt to cross the Mexico-US border. As Martiel shows, despite the highly-publicized “American Dream,” for these poor and uneducated immigrants, making it alive into US territory does not necessarily guarantee access to better opportunities or to a higher quality of life.

The artist’s performance also establishes parallelisms between the immigration struggle faced by millions of undocumented individuals and the continued drought that has triggered severe economic and environmental damage in California. Drought may be due solely to weather conditions or due to a combination of political and economic factors as well as population size and farming.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carlos Martiel is a Cuban performance artist whose work provides heavy criticism on the ethics of the world, its history and its behavior through provocative and raw performances that explore the nature of existence, social barriers and cultural traditions.

At the heart of Martiel’s work are powerful performances that raise questions about the way different societies have treated ethnic minorities and outsiders throughout history.

Martiel was born in Havana,Cuba in 1989 and graduated from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts, Havana in 2009. From 2008 to 2010, he studied in the Cátedra Arte de Conducta under the direction of artist Tania Bruguera. Martiel’s works have been included in the 2009 Havana Biennial, the 2010 Pontevedra Biennial, the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, Bogota’s 2013 La Otra Biennial, and the 2014 International Performance Art Biennial in Houston.

DIVERSEartLA

Artist: EUGENIA VARGAS PEREIRA

Project: Interactive Radio “Taking Head Transmitters”

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

Talking Head Transmitters proposes the use of the radio format as an open and dynamic experimental laboratory to explore a platform of cross-cultural communication with artists from around the globe. Talking Head Transmitters is an open medium, a space to promote spontaneous exchange among visitors, artists, school children and to all of those who would like to communicate, reflect, protest, play, sing, dance, and most of all, to get to know the people who inhabit Anaheim through the radio waves.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

In the late 1970s, Eugenia Vargas-Pereira came to the United States to study at the Montana Institute of the Arts, where she presented her first solo exhibition at the University Center Gallery in 1983. In September 1985, she arrived in Mexico, where she would live for over a decade, and quickly became part of the local art scene. Living in Mexico, Vargas-Pereira participated in several impor tant national and international exhibitions, such as A Marginal Body, The Photographic Image in Latin-America ( The Australian Center for Photography, 1987), and The Bleeding Heart, an exhibition that traveled throughout the United States and Latin-America during 1991-1993. In the late 1990s, she moved to Miami, where she participated in many local exhibitions. In 2003, Vargas-Pereira represented her native Chile at the Venice Biennale. In 2008, she moved back to Chile.

ART MOVEMENTS

The 2018 edition focused on the pivotal role of museums in our current era, transforming them into vital platforms for amplified protests against racism, white supremacy, and social inequality. Much like monuments, which often symbolize historical narratives and power dynamics, museums have increasingly become focal points for social critique and activism.

They are spaces where artists and communities confront systemic injustices, challenge dominant narratives, and advocate for change. By engaging with these issues, museums not only reflect the struggles of our time but also inspire dialogue and action, fostering a more inclusive understanding of history and culture.

Through this movement, we recognize the importance of art as a catalyst for social transformation and the responsibility of institutions to uphold these values.

MUSA The Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico.

Artist: JOSE CLEMENTE OROZCO

Project: Metaphysical Orozco

Curators: Laura Ayala & Marisa Caichiolo

The Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico (MUSA) presents Metaphysical Orozco, shown for the first time ever in the United States.

The images, projected by a multi-layer mapping, belong to the murals made by the artist between 1935 and 1937 at the auditorium known as Paraninfo, inside the building in which is located the Museum of the Arts.

The installation involves the public in an exploration of the fields of thought found within Orozco’s murals, as well as the history and themes that inspired them.

The projection of the master works will be accompanied by a musical soundtrack, giving visitors a comprehensive sensory experience that will be complemented by informative graphic material.

During the post-revolutionary years, muralism, based on the creation of monumental pictorial works, conveyed ideas regarding national identity while also highlighting the principles that define human dignity and the transcendence of social struggles throughout the world.

One of the main functions of the University of Guadalajara is the dissemination and promotion of culture. This mission has the museum to design and deliver a number of projects that today enjoy worldwide prestige, such as the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG).

A s an emblematic institution in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area, MUSA is widely recognized for creating museum experiences designed to generate knowledge and inspire reflection, and thus help to transform the social environment.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

José Clemente Orozco was one of the most important artists and muralists in Mexico, he created impressive, realistic paintings. A product of the Mexican Revolution, he overcame poverty and eventually traveled to the United States and Europe to paint frescos for major institutions. A man of unparalleled vision, as well as striking contradiction, he died of heart failure at age 65.

LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art & UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles.

Project: IF YOU DRINK HEMLOCK, I SHALL DRINK IT WITH YOU or A BEAUTIFUL DEATH; player to player, pimp to pimp. (As performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade): Daniel Joseph Martinez

Curator: Chon Noriega

THE WORK

Daniel Joseph Martinez’s immersive environment references JacquesLouis David’s seminal portrait The Death of Marat (1793), painted and also reproduced shortly after Marat’s assassination during the French Revolution. Whereas David’s painting represents a single moment, both sanitized and accurate in its details, Martinez creates a mise en scène using three life-like sculptures modeled after the artist’s own body. These depict Marat in his bath as well as assassin Charlotte Corday and Martinez himself both standing behind Marat (each with a bloodied dagger in hand).

Martinez stages Marat’s assassination as a public spectacle surrounded by bleachers, although viewers can also immerse themselves within the scene, no doubt taking selfies. In this way, Martinez connects David’s painting with our present moment, giving a historical dimension for modern politics as a form of theater, sport, and business. But Martinez pushes even further. The Death of Marat quickly became iconic of the French Revolution, not because it depicted a public spectacle, but rather because it circulated a political image that focused attention on the personal and private. Once that happened, politics-as-spectacle was no longer dependent on public space – it was in our minds.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

For more than 30 years, Los Angeles-born artist Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957) has been honing his politically-inflected practice, which critic Jeffrey Kastner has characterized as “unapologetically prob[ing] uncomfortable issues of personal and collective identity, seeking out threadbare spots in the fabric of conventional wisdom.” Martinez’s practice takes the form of photography, painting, site-specific installation, printed works, performance and public interventions to question issues of personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference.

DIVERSEartLA

Artist: ANTUAN

Project: Left or Right (Installation)

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

The interactive installation depicts different world leaders and tyrants, and will allow the spectator, through the punching of the bags, to release anger, hatred and resentment. This release of negative emotions will transform these objects into tools of detoxification and mental healing. Current global politics has created an environment of disrespect for humanity and our planet. Lack of harmony, senseless war, violence, racism, ignorance, loss of values and principles, lack of consciousness, super egos and demagoguery, corruption, disrespect of women, false promises, and outright lies.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Antuan is an integral environmentalist, transdisciplinary and cosmogonic artist. From the beginning of his artistic training, in the 80s, environmental problems occupied a central place in his thinking, when the environmental art movement arose, resulting in a theme present throughout the course of his career. Likewise, his work gained high interest and visibility, in art biennials, art fairs, and museums.

Antuan was born in Cuba 1972. In 1989, when he was just beginning to study, he created the ECO project of ephemeral art, at the age of 17 years. He obtained his degree in art at the ISP “Félix Varela” of Santa Clara, Cuba, in 1995. Achieving his research thesis, Art, Ecology, and Humanism, between 1995 and 1996. In it, Antuan already emphasizes the role of the artist as a social practitioner.

ART COLLECTIONS

In this edition, the curatorial focus examines how institutions and private collectors shape their art collections and the profound implications of their choices. Every acquisition and exhibition decision reflects not only individual tastes but also broader cultural, social, and political contexts. Their collections can bring visibility to emerging artists or underrepresented voices, or conversely, they can reinforce established hierarchies within the art world.

The dynamics between collectors and institutions create a complex ecosystem where the value of art is continually negotiated and redefined. By exploring the motivations and implications behind collection practices, we gain insight into how these entities influence the trajectory of contemporary art. This examination reveals the interconnectedness of art collections with societal values, the market, and the ongoing dialogue about representation and equity in the art world.

CCK Cultural Art Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Artist: MARTA MINUJÍN

Project: The Parthenon of Books & Rayuelarte

Curator: Gabriela Urtiaga

THE WORK

The Parthenon of Books: The return of democracy to Argentina in December 1983 was the inspiration that led Marta Minujín to create a replica of the Greek Parthenon on the “9 de Julio Avenue,” a street located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mujín’s Parthenon has a metal structure covered with more than 20,000 books, many of which had been banned during the military dictatorship. The Parthenon of Books honors the world’s first democracy and the values of that era, which have served as the basis for today’s Western democratic societies. This work also stands as a symbol of the country’s prolonged need and renewed hope to transition back to democracy. Over time, Mujín’s throught-provoking work has become an icon of freedom of expression. In 2017, the artist was invited to present a new version of this project at the 14th Edition of Documenta, one of the world’s top contemporary art events that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. Her new work was praised and highly acclaimed by the critics, who saw in this powerful piece an emblem of democracy and global freedom.

Rayuelarte is a playful and interactive intervention created by pop artist Marta Minujín in order to honor renowned Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, who wrote a book entitled “Rayuela.” Minujín reimagines Cortázar’s emblematic literary piece to bring to life an art piece that appeals directly to the participation of the public, for Rayuela is also a popular game played by children –and some adults– across the world.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marta Minujín (b.1943, Buenos Aires) is a multifaceted artist and a highly emblematic figure of Argentinian art since the 1960s. Hailed as one of the world’s greatest pop artists, her work has been shown across continents and in countries all over the globe.

LAUNCH LA, Los Angeles.

Artist: ADAH GLENN

Project: Boho Highs & Visual Drive-bys

Curators: Mar Hollingsworth, California African American

Museum’s Curator and James Panozzo

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Adah Glenn, also known as “AfroPuff,” is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and entrepreneur. Graffiti, hip-hop, punk, and rock, as well as Japanese anime, inform her work. Her practice is multidisciplinary, extending broadly from murals, paintings on canvas and shaped board, prints, art quilts, and books, to digital art and animation. Glenn has also ventured into the applied arts, creating wearable art, such as hats and jewelry, and toys, including fabric dolls and resin collectable figurines. Most recently, Glenn has embarked in performance art, that provides her an opportunity to integrate her many creative impulses.

Glenn’s art is vibrant and colorful, multilayered, and highly textural. As an African American woman, she often interweaves themes of race and gender politics in her work. Adah Glenn: Boho Highs & Visual Drive-bys presents a wide selection of her many talents in many mediums. The exhibit not only celebrates ethnic and cultural pride, music, and the female form, but also features a selection of Glenn’s poignant social commentary works.

DIVERSEartLA

Artist: SARAH TROUCHE

Performance: You should wear your revolution

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

For the “You should wear your revolution” project, Trouche is committed to research on women’s emancipation, inspired by the history of France during the French Revolution and the movement of the “Sans culottes.”

The artist was performing using hundreds of underwear that she has collected, washed and dyed beforehand. Through this action, she imagines a manifesto around the notion of female emancipation, radical and collective.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sarah Trouche (1983) is a French visual artist. Her artistic media are mainly performance, photography and video. She is a recipient of the Extramural Villa Médicis grant in the living arts category for her Arriba project and she participated in numerous collective exhibits, both in France (“Camera as release” for Paris Photo 2014, Centre d’art le Lait, le 104, the Brownstone foundation) and abroad (Artbat fest 2014 in Kazakhstan, Marrakech Biennial 2014 in Morocco, OCAC Taipei in Taiwan, New York Armory Show in the States, Hokusen gallery in Tokyo, Japan).

She’s also been invited to collaborate with several art schools, namely the École des Beaux-Arts de Metz and the École des Beaux-Arts d’Annecy in France and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in the States and the National Taiwan University of Arts abroad. Her work has been acquired by JP Morgan, Sjberwin, the Benenson Collection, the Mosquera Collection and the IADA Foundation.

MAC Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta, Argentina.

Artist: GUIDO YANNITO

Project: To Make Water

Curator: Claudia Lamas

THE WORK

This work is part of a project Hemisphere, created in Antarctica and generating a dialog on the geographical situation (hemispheres north & south) and of the mind (hemispheres right & left).

Antarctica is a radical environment and could be considered a geographic displacement. The hemisphere is presented as an undefined state where the body is situated as an idea of territory and landscape but also as a state of mind.

In the beginning this project consisted of researching the use of fresh water on the Antarctica bases, because Antarctica is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, an ongoing interest of the artist.

“To Make Water” is a phrase used by the people working on the base to describe the production of consumable water, because although it is the largest reserve of fresh water, it is very difficult to procure.

“To Make Water” is a video filmed the day the members of the base attempted the extraction.

LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art & UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles.

Artists: WESLEY ALLSBROOK, NANCY BAKER CAHILL, JORGE R. GUTIÉRREZ, AND DRUE KATAOKA.

Project: Virtual Futures: XR Showcase

Curators: Britt Salvesen and Jesse Damian

THE WORK

Virtual Reality is one of the most eagerly discussed topics in contemporary culture, yet many in the art world are only starting to consider its impact – aesthetic, technological, psychological, therapeutic, economic, and so forth. This year, DIVERSEartLA offers four VR experiences that demonstrate the range of practices and possibilities that are defining VR in 2019.

Visitors can get a glimpse of the future as seen by four different creative innovators: Wesley Allsbrook, Nancy Baker Cahill, Jorge R. Gutiérrez, and Drue Kataoka.

The tools for VR and AR creation and display – once the purview of engineers, available mainly in academia and the military – are now much more accessible to anyone with a story to tell: game designers, painters, screenwriters, documentarians, journalists, architects, choreographers, and many more. Often working collaboratively across several disciplines, this diverse community of creators is discovering the technology’s potential, involving audiences in the very act of creation.

According to consulting curator Jesse Damiani, “The advent of mainstream immersive technologies is the single greatest amplification of human capability since the discovery of fire, a paradigm shift so massive we’ve only just begun to taste its impact.”

MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach.

Artist: CRISTIAN CASTRO

Project: 27 Peces/27 Fish Installation

Curator: Carlos Ortega

Former Curator of Collections at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), presently holding the office of Chief Curator at the Museum of Ventura County (MVC).

THE WORK

The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) selected Argentinian artist Cristian Castro and his site-specific installation, 27 Peces / 27 Fish, 2018, to highlight the contemporary art of Latin America in the 2019 edition of the Los Angeles Art Show.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cristian Castro, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1971 and currently based in Los Angeles, expresses his artistic talent by repurposing discarded vintage household appliances and mechanical tools with contemporary designs of his own. In the 27 Fish installation, the artist used 1950s Johnson brand outboard motors for the main body, stainless steel cat bowls, kitchen hinges, nails for the teeth, electrical conduits, fiberglass, custom laser-cut aluminum parts molded with a hydraulic press for the fins, and automotive paint with chromed and polished elements to create these hybrid creatures that appear to come from a 19th-century vision of the future.

Very much like the Argentinian collective Center for Art and Communication (CAyC) in the 1970s and 1980s, Castro conceives his installations as multidisciplinary spaces in which to explore the relationship between art, science, environment, and society. The deep-sea fish in 27 Fish were created in a retro-futuristic style, incorporating kinetic movement and light.

ABOUT MOLAA

The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) expands knowledge and appreciation of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art through its collections, ground-breaking exhibitions, stimulating educational programs, and engaging cultural events.

Founded in 1996, MOLAA is located in the East Village Arts District in downtown Long Beach and serves the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area including Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, while simultaneously reaching international audiences through its collaborations, website, and social media.

Robert E. Holmes Collection, Los Angeles.

Project: Selections from the Robert E. Holmes Collection: A Black Man in the World

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

ABOUT THE ART COLLECTOR

For Bob Holmes who calls himself “a citizen of the world,” his art collection is a reflection of his life and times. The history of both colonial oppression by Europeans in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, and the history of slavery in the United States have created a warped perception of Black people as they have moved, or been forced to move, throughout the world. That perception has often created a narrow impression of Black people’s and other peoples of colors’ interests, limitations, possibilities and futures.

Holmes says, “As one steps out of the manner in which he is perceived, challenges widely held perceptions about the Black body, travels throughout the world and accumulates broad interests, that accumulated knowledge and experience can lift one out of seeing and being seen in a purely racial context, while at the same time, standing firmly upon the foundation of one’s ethnic culture.” In Holmes’ particular case, those tenets have enriched his life beyond the prescribed boundaries of narrow perceptions and identity, and have led to a broad collection of art that reflects his appreciation and love of rich cultural identities of so-called ethnic categories.

In his wide collection we can find a diverse offering of cultures through artists such as Dan McCleary, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Derrick Maddox, Charles White, Romare Bearden, Gronk, Deni Ponty, Betty Parsons, Elizabeth Catlett, David Alfaro Siquieros and Aime Mpane, among many others.

DIVERSEartLA

Artist: DORIAN WOOD

Project: Performance: Nodrissx/Narcissx

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

For “Nodrissx/Narcissx,” the artist will be in a chair in the center of a darkened room, covered from head to toe in a cloth, with a slit that exposes their left breast. The artist will have a microphone propped in front of their face. Attendees are invited to kneel in front of the artist and suckle on artist’s breast. Attendees may suckle on the breast for as long as they want. During the performance installation, artist will vocalize to a 4-channel soundscape created solely by artist’s voice.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dorian Wood seeks to glorify both the sanctity and irreverence of intimacy. Through the use of their corpulent body and booming voice, Wood revels in challenging the artist-audience separation, using

subject matter informed by their own position in society as a nonbinary person of color and an autodidact without a formal college education nor a strong alliance to any particular community.

Wood’s work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at such institutions as The Broad (Los Angeles), LACMA (Los Angeles), The Stone (NYC), MASS Gallery (Austin), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). As a musician, they have released over a dozen recordings, among them two back-to-back albums, Rattle Rattle and Down, The Dirty Roof, showcasing a series of doomsday-themed songs that incorporate over 60 musicians. Their most recent album, XALÁ, marks the first time that Wood has recorded a full-length work in their mother tongue of Spanish.

CCK Cultural Art Center, Buenos Aires,Argentina.

Artist: ANDRES PAREDES

Project: Memorable Mud

Curator: Gabriela Urtiaga

THE WORK

“Memorable Mud” is a participative installation that draws viewers into a multi-sensorial experience featuring scents, music – exclusively composed for this art work – and a carefully designed system reflecting light through translucent stones. The piece is the end result of an exploratory process that generates two experiences for attendees. The first experience begins as the viewer enters the room and comes across giant clay structures, clay domes with pinnacles and other elements, which hang from the ceiling from a height of 1.4 meters. This landscape acts as a bubble of clay, which is retrieved from the production place. The domes have their own inner world – one which can be accessed by the public through holes located in the lower part. This all acts as a place where the artist’s life and personal memories are stored and materialize in clay.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Andrés Paredes’s work ranges from drawings and two-dimensional cutting paper to immersive installations, and make up private collections in Argentina and in several countries abroad. He lives and works in both Misiones and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

ART SHARE LA, Los Angeles.

Project: Art Lives Here

Artist: SC MERO

Art Share L.A. has partnered with skid-row based, emerging guerrilla artist S.C. Mero to bring a taste of the streets of Downtown Los Angeles to LA Art Show. Embodying the nature of downtown, the onsite installation pieces are just a teaser to the larger site map of her work – which guides attendees into downtown to explore our community under the guise of a pseudo street art scavenger hunt.

Each of her site-specific, clever creations calls attention to issues surrounding homelessness, gentrification, drug use, global warming, and more. The goal of this project is to encourage further exploration of underground art, arts activism, and social justice in the Downtown community in a way that is inviting and accessible for everyone.

AAL Art Collection, Santiago, Chile.

Artists: GASTON UGALDE, MATILDE MARIN, SANDRA MANN, FERNANDO ARIAS

Project: White Lies

Curators: Elisa Massardo & Daniel Alfonso

THE WORK

White Lies is an exhibition that emerges from the dialogue of visual arts and politics; the visual arts and the reality around the world, where the politic act looks like a manifestation of power that dominates and control the masses and minds, forgetting the initial idea of common benefit and the social welfare.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

Arte Al Límite (AAL) promotes the work of contemporary artists from all over the globe, aiming to Foster art circulation, encouraging art collecting and bringing art closer to the community through worldwide activities.

DIVERSITY

As we approached the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the curatorial focus in this edition remained steadfast in its commitment to exploring organizations and museums that champion inclusion and diversity.

In a time marked by significant political and social upheaval, the importance of amplifying diverse voices and perspectives became increasingly urgent. This focus highlights the vital role that cultural institutions play in fostering dialogue and understanding in a divided society. Organizations and museums dedicated to inclusion serve as essential platforms for underrepresented artists, communities, and narratives, providing spaces where diverse experiences can be shared and celebrated.

By prioritizing diversity in their programming and collections, these institutions challenge traditional narratives and contribute to a more equitable art landscape. The 2020 edition not only showcases their initiatives but also reflects on the broader implications of diversity within the art world. In examining the efforts of these organizations, we recognize the transformative power of art as a vehicle for social change.

Arte Al Límite Collection

Ca.Sa Collection

AMA Foundation Collection

Lidia & Eduardo Rubinstein Collection

Kai Loebach Collection

Artists: Bernardo Oyarzún, Mono Lira, Enrique Ramirez, Mariana Telleria y Ricardo Alcaide

Project: The True Love of Collecting, How Collectors

Reshape the International Art Scene

Curators: Marisa Caichiolo & Elisa Massardo

It’s no mystery that many of our museum experiences are led by visionary collectors who have either made significant donations or opened new museums to exhibit their extensive art collections.

Art Collectors shape the international contemporary art scene because of the unique decisions and thoughtful connections with other art enthusiasts and art market players.

AAL Magazine from Chile will bring an exhibition that explores the Subjectivity of Collecting in the contemporary art world today.

It will reveal the mystery behind the passion of collecting, and focusing on the question about what exactly makes them fall in love with an art piece. Collectors recognize the value that artists bring to communities, and bring them to the light of other art professionals and art institutions.

COLLECTORS & ARTISTS

Collection AAL, Chile – Bernardo Oyarzún

Collection Ca.Sa., Chile – Mono Lira

Collection AMA Foundation, Chile – Enrique Ramirez

Kim Martindale, USA – Raphael Montañez Ortiz

Lidia Rubinstein, Argentina/USA – Mariana Telleria

Kai Loebach, Germany/USA – Ricardo Alcaide

LACMA & UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles.

Artist: GRONK

Project: Pyramids

Curator: Chon Noriega

For his new work called “Pyramids,” L.A. artist Gronk will be re-imaging the opera stage he originally designed and painted in 2013 for Peter Sellar’s adaptation of Purcell’s semi-opera “The Indian Queen (1695). That work connected Purcell’s fanciful notions of the Conquest with current issues of immigration and authoritarianism.

During the run of the LA Art Show, Gronk was painting on a full-size mock-up of a theatrical stage, providing visitors with a behind-thecurtain view of his artistic practice as well as of the set making involved in performance and media culture.

Unlike a theatrical performance, the set design was completed only after the exhibition closes and the audience is gone. Rather than see a finished work, visitors were able to interact with the artist, participating in the process of making a “political theater” for our contemporary moment.

Programs included a dialogue between Gronk and Peter Sellars, and an impromptu performance, both using the theatrical space created by “Pyramids.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Gronk (born 1954 in East Los Angeles, born Glugio Nicandro, is a chicano painter, printmaker, and per formance artist. His work is collected by museums around the country including the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Gronk was born in Los Angeles to Mexican American parents and was raised primarily by his mother. He started creating things at a young age. He cites pop culture as a source of inspiration. Another artistic influence on Gronk was his uncle, who would frequently draw. Among other influences, foreign films which he generally watched in Santa Monica, are mentioned. He was fascinated with the larger world and concepts that many of these films from Russia, France and elsewhere brought to his imagination. At age fourteen, Gronk started writing his own plays.

The Broad, Los Angeles.

Project: I See You, I Am Seen: On the Impact of the Diversity

Curator: George Luna Peña

In recent years, initiatives to diversify art museum staff have accrued considerable currency. Although more work is still needed, the calls for greater diversity have rippled through the art world. In Los Angeles, The Broad has been a leading institution in this work through its innovative Diversity Apprenticeship Program (DAP).

A full time, paid apprenticeship in art handling and preparations for those underrepresented on museum staffs, the DAP is shifting demographics and changing the landscape of equity in the museum field.

Taking its title from a speech by educator and former Black Panther party member Ericka Huggins to the American Alliance of Museums, this space features immersive photography and video which highlight the first-hand experiences of DAP participants as they build museum careers.

Danubiana Museum, Bratislava, Slovaquia.

Project: The Birth of the Niemand Artist: VIKTOR FRESO

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

The Birth of the Niemand consists of monumental large sculptures. They represent a whole range of negative emotions that people try to hide in their lives, such as maliciousness, inferiority complex, and unhealthy self-confidence. The artist studied in Bratislava at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and in Prague at the Academy of Fine Arts. Frešo belongs to the most remarkable figures of the contemporary art in the region of the former Czechoslovakia, Europe. His work and overall approach to art is rather untypical but at the same time they reflect the situation in the society and culture

The artist creates sophisticated concepts and projects presenting them as seemingly simple closed “Pieces of Art”. He is often critical

in his works and aggressively expresses his contempt of the art scene itself and its processes but with a light, humorous and playful undertone. One of the most fascinating elements of his creation is the seeming counterpoint of emphasis on huge, grandiose EGO connected with a Gesture in combination with disarming self-ironic humility. His ability to reveal dark sides of his soul, or stumbles and throws them to the world regardless of consequences, shifts the author.s concepts to broader possibilities of perception of the reasons of his work. Viktor Frešo is interested in direct, efficient, visual tools. He creates a certain space between action- reaction and the conditions of quick recognition of relations between the expressing of me and the indication of others.

La Neomudejar Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Project: Dactiloscopia Rosa: Video Art and QUEER Constructions

Curator: Nestor Prieto

The exhibition will be from the archive materials, documentations and teachings from the transfeminist/Queer archive of the Museum, didactic materials from the constructions of social movements that managed to pass the social perspective that existed on the LGTBQ community in the 70s, 80s and 90s in Spain under Franco Dictatorship, the audiovisual material is a compilation of demonstrations, celebrations and activisms, vintage posters.

The first version of this installation outside of the Museum La Neomudejar was in 2018 at the Matadero Space in Madrid, parallel to the world pride celebration in the city.

It will be a chronology of the movement of sexual liberation / LGTBQ in Spain (1970-2016).

MOLAA | Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach.

Project: Celebrating Diversity Artists: CHIACHIO & GIANNONE

Curator: Gabriela Urtiaga

In order to commemorate local and international LGBTQ+ communities around the world, the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) is presenting a special installation about diversity and pride in collaboration with world-known Argentinian artistic duo, Leo Chiachio & Daniel Giannone.

The presentation includes the 120 ft. long textile flag, MOLAA’s new acquisition “Californian Family in Six Colors 1” and a recorded interview about their creative process. These artworks were created by the artists at MOLAA where more than 3,000 members of the Long Beach and Los Angeles community collaborated in the creation of the flag.

The creation of this work of art took place during the artists’ MOLAA residency between March and June, 2019. Visitors and community members were invited to contribute with the construction of the work of art by adding their own messages about the meaning of diversity and acceptance. The banner was carried by over 100 volunteers at the Long Beach Pride Parade and exhibited at the event Pride at The Port in San Pedro, CA.

The Museum highlights underrepresented voices of Latin Americans and Latinos in the US and around the world. This installation represents the commitment of MOLAA towards the values of diversity and inclusion for all through the arts.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Chiachio & Giannone is an Argentinian artist duo that creates textile mosaics and hand embroidery. The artists are Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone, who live and work together in Buenos Aires.

Chiachio was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1969, while Daniel Giannone was born in Cordoba, Argentina in 1964. They met at a friend’s house in 2003 and have collaborated on art ever since. Their artwork is primarily fabric-based textiles and embroidery, with the occasional gouache painting.

AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Washington.

Artist: VICENTE GONZÁLEZ MIMICA

Project: Mimica From The South Portraits: Punta Arenas and Valparaíso

Curator: Fabian Goncalvez

The artist presents black-and-white portraits from two cities in the south of Chile. Like in the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities, one city (London) is described as law-abiding and orderly— analogous to how the artist presents Punta Arenas—and is contrasted with a largely politically agitated city (Paris), which is how González sees Valparaíso.

As the artist describes: “The city is violent to me at first sight, perhaps with the character of who has made himself. It grows every day like the jungle that penetrates its streams in all the hills that make it up to reach the sea. It is not planned, it only occupies the spaces left by nature, like plants in an abandoned garden.”

In González’s Liceo series, he celebrates the individual achievements of each student, while seeing the fruits of hard work of families, teachers, and friends. They have been suspended in a time defining adolescence and hope. These students’ portraits in school uniforms, in long Liceo hallways and in workshops wearing trade uniforms, is reminiscent of a hopeful past.

It is as if González were evoking the ancestors who arrived to these shores to fulfill dreams and prosper. As Alfred Doblin wrote on August Sanders’ portraits of German people: they are a maximized expression of the combined efforts of a social class, where the greatest achievement is the taming of individuality.

He adds that it was their desire to succeed that brought them to this point, and that belonging to this place ultimately held them back as people.

Homeira Goldstein Collection, Los Angeles.

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

Artist: TIM TOMPKINS

ABOUT THE COLLECTOR:

A descendent of the Qajar Royal Dynasty in Middle East, a multitalented force dedicated to creativity and arts, and an avid contemporary art collector, Homeira Goldstein has built an unrivaled reputation championing national and international artists promoting art and culture in Greater Los Angeles.

-As the Chairman of the Board of TIME4ART, she has been instrumental in creating opportunities for artists to reach public audiences using traditional and innovative venues, such as art centers, pop-up venues, open spaces, and private homes.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

The inspiration for Timothy Tompkins’s work is the reflection of both physically and metaphorically a relational narrative which dissolves into form and color. This effect endeavors to mimic the layers of codes and semiotics of an image while simultaneously asking the viewer to participate in an expanded dialogue of contemplation and connotation of content. Additionally, the paintings attempt to reflect the influences of contemporary society, such as consumerism, mass media, and digital culture. Tompkins’s interest in both the language of painting and contemporary theories of visual culture attract him to the images produced by various media, as a loose visual connection to painting’s history and the medium’s influence as a visual communicator.

DIVERSEartLA

Artist: ADRIANA RAMIREZ

Project: I GOING TO.. (An interactive space intervention)

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

This platform has an axis: Everyone’s capacity to decide and become the creator of his or her own destiny, and therefore the responsibility of the community’s future. It is based on two premises: the first, is that we do not come to this world only to know ourselves, but also we come to it with the possibility of creating ourselves; and the second, is that every individual is surrounded by a social group and coexists thanks to language.

In order of that, this platform invites people to experience the language,s power to built future realities by declaring: when one AFFIRMS something, language is used to describe reality; it means that words depend on the world which already exists; for instance “Today is raining”. On the other hand, when one DECLARES something, language is used to define reality, therefore our world will depend on the words pronounced; for example, “Today, I am going to listen before speaking”.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Adriana Ramírez is a contemporary artist, mainly associated with conceptual art. Adriana Ramírez is a Colombian female artist born in Bogota, Colombia in 1974. Adriana Ramírez’s artistic practice revolves around creating spatial drawings that challenge viewers to think differently about everyday objects. She uses empty figures found in daily life to explore the dichotomy between interior and exterior, often representing objects paradoxically. Ramirez’s main themes include questioning the relationship between objects and their contents, using three-dimensional drawings as her medium to provoke new perspectives and reflections.

DIVERSEartLA

Artists: PSJM COLLECTIVE

(CANARY

ISLANDS)

Project: There Could Be A Monster Inside You

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

THE WORK

PSJM presented at the LA ART SHOW 2020 the same performance they created for the 58th Venice Biennale context, one of its corporate performances in which uniformed hostesses interact with the public in order to cause startle and reflection.

Combining marketing and totalitarianism, using the strategy of “overidentification” theorized by Zizek, the collective presents itself aesthetically appropriating the strategies and modes of seduction of the capitalist system in an authoritarian way.

ABOUT THE COLLECTIVE

PSJM is a team of creation, theory and management formed by Cynthia Viera (Las Palmas G.C., 1973) and Pablo San José (Mieres, 1969). PSJM present themselves as an «art brand», thus appropriating the procedures and strategies of advanced capitalism to subvert their symbolic structures.

PSJM acts as an trademark of happening art addressing issues of the artwork in the market, communication with consumers, or function as an artistic quality, using communication resources borrowed from capitalism of the spectacle to underscore the paradoxes produced by its unbridled development.

Los Angeles Arts Association / Gallery 825, Los Angeles.

Artist: MISS ART WORLD

Project: Diversity Walks and Talks

Curator: Peter Mays

The “Diversity Walks and Talks” performance invites individual proclaimers of LA’s culture to strut the runway in celebration of their uniqueness, showcasing LA’s diversity. A variety of participants were pre-selected and interviewed about what diversity represents to them. Their interviews were played during the runway either in video or audio format.

Spectators were also recruited live to walk the runway. A photographer at the end of the runway documented all individuals and their photos were instantly displayed on a runway wall.

This performance, like LA’s fashion and celebrity culture, is high energy, fast paced, and confident.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Miss Art World (Katherine J Cooksey or Katherine Cooksey-Nestved) was born and raised in California, She completed her Bachelor of Fine Art from California State University, Bakersfield, and received her Master of Fine Art from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Katherine was diagnosed with incurable eye disease at the age of ten and has struggled with her vision ever since.

As Katherine’s vision started to deteriorate, her father began to teach her how to paint. Unfortunately, her 8th-grade art teacher told her, “You can’t be an artist if you can’t see” which led Katherine to give up art for years. The rejection and prejudices that arose from the academic environment led Katherine to seek out other means of fulfillment. This came in the form of beauty pageants and modeling. Over the years, she participated in pageants and modeling, winning several titles including Miss Teen Hawaiian Tropic, Miss Bakersfield, first runner up for Miss California International, Miss California Global Nation Pageant and Miss New York World.

Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles.

Artist: TAIJI TERASAKI

Project: Transcendients: Heroes At Borders

Curator: Emily Anderson, PhD

TRANSCENDIENTS is a unique collaboration between artist Taiji Terasaki and JANM that honors HEROES AT BORDERS: individuals that advocate and fight for those who face discrimination, prejudice and inequity at borders both physical and conceptual. These heroes, whether known or unsung, inspire their fellow Americans, their neighborhoods and communities, government policy, and social change. By illuminating their stories, we hope to educate museumgoers about their work and inspire a spirit of unity and action in support of democracy and justice for all.

This exhibition spotlights important figures working to overcome and transcend borders that reinforce discrimination, inequity, and intolerance. Whether it be those fighting to rectify human rights injustices and to counter anti-immigrant sentiments and actions, members of the LGBTQ+ community seeking equal rights, women pressing for equal pay, or religious adherents who want to worship in safety, these heroes use their personal experiences to build bridges of understanding that connect us at the core of our collective humanity. It is imperative that those who believe in freedom, fairness, and social justice are emboldened to unite and support the forces of democracy and human decency. These concerns–their echoes in history and their far-reaching future impact–are the impetus for this unique collaboration between artist Taiji Terasaki and JANM.

ART, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Art, Science, and Technology: Highlighting Women and NonBinary Artists. The focus of this edition centers on the vital presence, contributions, research, and documentation of women and non-binary artists who are leading the way at the intersection of art, science, and technology.

This exploration is enriched and amplified by the involvement of guest museums, institutions, and not-for-profit organizations dedicated to showcasing innovative practices and diverse perspectives within these fields. As we navigate an era increasingly defined by technological advancements and scientific inquiry, the contributions of women and non-binary artists become crucial in reshaping our understanding of creativity and innovation. These artists challenge conventional boundaries and offer fresh insights, using their unique experiences and viewpoints to inform their work.

By engaging with science and technology, they explore complex themes such as identity, environment, and social justice, creating artworks that resonate deeply with contemporary audiences. This edition not only highlights individual artists but also recognizes the collaborative efforts of institutions committed to supporting and promoting these voices.

AMA Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC.

Artist: MARÍA VERÓNICA SAN MARTÍN, LUIS COBELO AND YOLANDA LEAL

Project: Dignidad, National Archive of Chile performance, series of Dignidad, 2018 and performances.

Curator: Fabian Goncálves

Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) has joined with a special project curated by Fabian Goncálves, that featured a compilation of material and the work of women artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practices throughout history, as well as by women and non binary people whose forward-thinking practices are currently reshaping the field.

Venezuelan artist Luis Cobelo (PILAR) part of AMA with a performance, Yolanda Leal from Mexico presented the performance Gorilla Nature and a special performance also presented by María Verónica San Martin.

Dignidad is an art installation at The National Archive of Chile based on secret telephone documents about Colonia Dignidad. Found in 2012 by the ex-settler and activist, Winfried Hempel, the audios reveal for the first time to the public conversations between Paul Schäfer and other Nazi agents in 1978. Through sculpture, sound, performance, text, and a selection of historical archives, the installation reveals a complex system of codes and transcontinental actions that culminated in crimes against minors and opponents of the Chilean civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990).

La Neomudejar Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Artist: ANA MARCOS

Project: DATA | ergo sum | RELOADED Installation

Curator: Nestor Prieto

THE WORK

DATA | ergo sum | RELOADED is an interactive Art installation that visualizes the capability of viewing machines using Artificial Intelligence to extract data by a simple observation of visitors, created by artist Ana Marcos.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ana Marcos is a graduate in Fine Arts from Madrid University and Industrial Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. As a multidisciplinary artist, she combines different art forms like interactive installations, video, and photography, working on new ways of experimentation in the field of arts.

She is the leader and co-founder of 3Dinteractive, a group of engineers and artists that seeks, through research, a deeper understanding of the relationship among art- science-technology and the public. All technology produces a change in our way of living and understanding reality. Today, we have at our disposal complex, innovative technological environments, works based on experimentation and studies of Universities from all over the world and all that knowledge is available on the network to be shared not only by technologists, but also by artists.

It is clear the momentum and relevance of that technology in general, and Artificial Intelligence in particular, is gaining in our society and, as an artist, she believes that artistic work has the obligation to explore and experiment in the field of AI. Art always makes its way into thought and therefore also into technology, and can provide other perspectives to the most innovative developments. Whether AI it is a tool or a discipline, it is – and will be – a topic of work for artists. Hopefully, art will also be able to influence the developments in AI.

San Marcos Museum of Art (MASM), Lima, Perú.

Artist: ANGIE BONINO

Project: The Symphony of Now

The San Marcos Museum of Art (MASM) from Lima, Perú will bring a new media project of augmented reality by Peruvian artist Angie Bonino, titled “THE SYMPHONY OF NOW, which consists of a video installation, and interactive sound installation focusing on the Andean techno de-colonial shamanism.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

The artist, Angie Bonino, was born in Lima (Peru), in 1974, and she has continuously travelled all over the world – she even lived and worked in Barcelona, Spain for eleven years. It should come as no surprise then that the main medium of her artistic proposals is precisely the motion pictures, specifically video and video installations. However, this does not mean that they are her only forms of expression. Angie Bonino is an artist of our time in all senses, a multimedia artist focusing on the crossover of art and technology. After all, in addition to video, her works are also expressed in animation, digital techniques, graphic prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures. Yet, through all of this plurality of media, there remains at all times the same predominant aesthetic intention: to question the image.

In Angie Bonino’s work, this questioning of the image through artworks always has a moral and political intent. Her goal is to reveal, in all the hyper-mediatic image production and transmission networks, the dissemination of the invisible, occult, power spheres and systems which determine the configuration of what she calls the image world:

“This world in which we live today, which has become an engulfing universal screen that traps and subjects our eyes, but that does not let us see. Because of their extreme, extraordinarily intense visibility – repetitive, hypnotizing, alienating – the power networks and their objectives of domination become invisible. And thus, unnoticed, their domination becomes inscrutable and fully irreversible.”

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Artists: CARMEN ARGOTE AND ZEYNEP ABES

Project: Immersive Distancing

Curator: Chon Noriega

Curated by Chon Noriega, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center will present a special project titled Immersive Distancing by artists Carmen Argote and Zeynep Abes. This exhibition will examine recent media art produced during the Covid-19 pandemic by L.A.-based artists Carmen Argote (Mexico, b. 1981) and Zeynep Abes (Turkey, b. 1993). Zeynep Abes now lives and works in Los Angeles.

These artists address our ongoing cultural and political moment in relation to the body, memory, archival traces, and the urban landscape. Immigration – as both personal experience and socio-political reality –informs their larger body of work. These artists have previously worked in installation and sculpture, drawing heavily on family artifacts and archives as well as explorations of architectural space. Here, they

approach media as a visualizing technology that brings their site-based works into an immersive narrative, while they also engage, adapt, and challenge the abstraction inherent in science – but especially digital science.

The production, formal characteristic, and content of these media works were directly impacted by Covid-19 restrictions, moving each artist to develop remote modes of working that blurred the line between production and post-production. Both artists drew upon multiple digital sources: video, photography, and audio recordings .

In Last Light, Argote uses the sights and sounds of her walks across L.A. during the pandemic as the basis for a meditation on dis-ease and destruction. She turns to the foundation for all science – measurement

– proposing to measure her body in relation to the scale of the city and the world, but uses the foundation for all art – the hand – as the basis for establishing scale.

In Memory Place, Abes explores three moments in her “fraying certainty” about Istanbul as it becomes an idea more than a place, visualizing this process through point cloud data and photogrammetry that transform video and photographs into 3D environments that recede from the viewer. These environments are impressionistic and partial – with gaps here and there in the scenes depicted, and with portions of imagery coming into sharper focus as they move toward the vanishing point. In both works, the fragmentary nature of the imagery is made immersive by the sound design.

Now Art LA and Building Bridges Art Exchange, Los Angeles.

Artist: LUCIANA ABAIT

Project: Agua/ Water

Now Art LA and Building Bridges Art Exchange have joined together as local non profit organizations to present the work Agua by artist Luciana Abait, a video projection inspired by the flood-myth motif that occurs in many cultures in which water acts a healing and re-birth tool, often referencing ideas of creation, purification and sustaining life.

Agua offers the public a space, an oasis, for healing and understanding. The work is site specific and architecturally integrated to foster a poetic awareness of water as a sacred resource for humanity while creating a moment of reflection for those who attend. Agua is a multichannel artwork combining videos of water gathered through years from nature exploration around the globe. The shifting color hues seen throughout express various states of mind and emotion, harmonizing the interactive experience physically with an internal one.

Agua as exhibited in downtown Los Angeles supports a call to action and underlines the importance of water as a key component to our future survival.

“I intend for this work to participate in opening awareness and actions surrounding environmental initiatives with depth, beauty, grace and wonder”. Luciana Abait

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Luciana Abait was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is currently based in Los Angeles where she is a resident artist of 18TH Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Her multimedia works deal with climate change and environmental fragility, and their impacts on immigrants in particular.

Abait is the recipient of the 2016 Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship Award, the 2022 “Art Lives Here” Award by the Geffen Playhouse, the 2023 Counter Image printing grant, and the 2024 L.L. Stewart Fellowship by the Oregon State University.

DIVERSEartLA

Project: IMAGRAPHY, art documentary.

Director: Alejandro Ordoñez

Producers: Yesenia Higuera, Alejandro Ordoñez & Benjamin

Price

Imagraphy is a documentary where a variety of international photographers share their stories about the craft, the industry, techniques and their overall impressions of the world as seen through their lenses. Featuring: Roger Ballen, James Balog, John Batho, Peter Bialobrzeski, Michel Comte, Ralph Gibson, Greg Gorman, Henry Horenstein, Graciela Iturbide, Hiroji Kubota, Sir Derry Moore, Howard Schatz, Andres Serrano, Sandy Skoglund, Paul Watson, and Stephen Wilkes.

DIVERSEartLA

PERFORMANCE: Un/Seen

Artist: TIFFANY TRENDA

Project: Un/Seen, performance.

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

Artist Tiffany Trenda presents Un/Seen, a live performance within an immersive experience using volumetric capture. It transforms in realtime depending upon the actions of the public.

With new immersive experiences, we become disembodied. That is, we are physically in one space while our eyes and thoughts are experiencing another world simultaneously. Our bodies become dissociated as we shift between the simulated and the real. Furthermore, we are not immediately within the presence of another. Our presence is mediated and transported into another space that doesn’t actually exist. We are in essence, seen and unseen.

These new applications also blur the role of the user and creator by allowing both parties to change the experience. That is, the spectator is no longer a witness but a collaborator. Also, all parties are represented as avatars and this opens a narrative of, “who is this?” and “what will happen?” Our roles as players in these games are ambiguous, a perfect reflection of our time with the uncertainty of our future.

Women’s Voices Now, Los Angeles

Project: Girls’ Voices Now

Women’s Voices Now (WVN) is a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that uses the power of film to drive positive social change that advances the rights of women and girls globally.

We seek to challenge the mis- and under-representation of women by promoting films made by women, about women, for all.

Girls’ Voices Now has served 70 girls from under-resourced communities and overseen the production of their 12 short films, which have been selected and awarded in 48 film festivals, and watched by over 522,000+ online viewers thanks to our partnerships with Here Media, Kanopy, UN Women, and the UN #HeforShe Campaign.

This program empowers girls and femme-identifying youth from under- resourced communities to find, develop, and use their voices for positive social change through filmmaking.

GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS

This edition centers on humanity’s representation in art and its intricate connection to the environment. By exploring how various artistic expressions reflect our relationship with nature, the exhibition aims to deepen our understanding of the pressing issues surrounding the global climate crisis.

Artists from diverse backgrounds contribute to this dialogue, using their work to comment on ecological degradation, climate change, and the urgent need for sustainable practices. Through a range of mediums—be it painting, sculpture, installation, or multimedia—this exhibition sparks important discussions about the Earth’s past, present, and future.

It invites viewers to reflect on the historical context of environmental degradation while also considering the immediate consequences of human actions on the planet.

Dox Contemporary, Prague, Czech Center New York & The General Consulate of The Czech Republic in Los Angeles.

Artist: Swen Leer

Project: THE SIGN Site specific installation

Highway signs are always right. Not in a political way but by way of conveying a fact. In our time of social-media-fed competing narratives, “alternative facts” and fake news, the road sign seems to be one of the last anchors of truth that everyone can agree on, left and right. It is a true icon of Los Angeles, a city of freeways and cars, of people commuting to and fro, many hours a day, each day.

Arguably, road signs are the most read and trusted literature of Los Angeles, if we can call them that. On the one hand, they are a powerful symbol of progress of the last century, and of mobility. On the other hand, however, they represent the evidence of our technological rampage that has led us into a real climate crisis.

The installation, The Sign, plugs into this a-priori factuality by mimicking the iconic freeway signage, while communicating an unexpected message: “Your children WILL hate you – eventually”. The text is speculation about the future of our society as well as a deeply disturbing existential thought that has probably crossed the mind of most parents.

Their kids are the ones who will pick up the tab of our celebrated economical progress – a religion of economical growth at all costs.

Placing the iconographic freeway sign into the interior of the LA Convention Center creates an absurd situation for the viewer, conveying a disturbing message in the matter-of-fact form they have recently seen getting off the freeway to get to the LA Art Show. And the message stands, after all – highway signs are always right. Right?

MUSA Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara and MCA Museum of Environmental Science, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Artist: CLAUDIA RODRIGUEZ

Project: The Other Waterfall & Chapala Drops...Drop By Drop

Curator: Moises Schiaffino

Through the University of Guadalajara Foundation | USA, the Universidad de Guadalajara presents their most relevant museum projects: MUSA Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara and MCA Museum of Environmental Science.

MUSA is a museum with 27 years of history. Their exhibition program includes activities in which the arts become an impulse to motivate social transformation. Their compromise with the environment was consolidated with a state certification that recognizes the process and actions of the institution to protect the natural environment. The MUSA Museum of the Arts was one of the first university properties that implemented sustainable actions related to the management and recycling of waste, as well as, the rational use of water and energy.

The MCA Museum of Environmental Science is an upcoming project of the university. Envisioned as a space engaging with the community in order to foster a sense of belonging through empathy and closeness, that will lead the community to initiate actions of ecology preservation. There are three main visions that constitute the vocation of this museum: to understand the urban dynamics and their impact in nature, the equal disclosure of science, and the generation of emotions that lead to learning.

This time, the MCA presents two installations from the artist, Claudia Rodríguez: La otra cascada — The Other Waterfall — and Chapala también se-a-gota — Chapala drops...drop by drop —, both reflecting the contamination and lack of water that has affected the state of Jalisco, Mexico in the last decades.

MUMBAT Museum of Fine Arts of Tandil & Museum of Nature and Science Antonio Serrano of Entre Rios, Argentina.

Artist: GUILLERMO ANSELMO VEZZOSI

Project: The Earth’s Fruits

Curator: Indiana Gnocchini

The Earth’s Fruits is constituted as a scientific research project whose ideology culminates with an installation work of a specific ephemeral site, where the waste that takes on a second life is dignified. The immersive installation invites us to reconsider that we are part of a whole with nature – a complex whole in constant mutation and adaptation. It challenges us to examine our most recondite thoughts, questioning who we are and the links that unite us to our habitat. In this way, it propositions the visitor to act on new imaginaries, creating an illusion of time and place, where he is the protagonist.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Guillermo Anselmo Vezzosi, expresses a reflection on his long-standing concern about how our primacies and human values have increasingly

distanced us from our true essence, and rethinking our priorities as a society. Our social habits within the last few decades – which have been based around consumption – have had an impact on climate change, on the conservation of the environment, and the necessary care of the environment – individually and collectively.

Artists have explored new perspectives on approaching “creative doing” by using environmental art, by creating awareness through ecological activism. In this sense, Guillermo shows us the huge colossal amounts of waste that we add every day and it is from his own work, in line with the community, that he dedicates his hours collecting from the same environment he inhabits, which he calls Fruits of Progress. He aims to heal the footprint of contemporary man, which at present it seems irreversible.

Raubtier Productions & Unicus, Los Angeles.

Project: Environmental Digital

Experience by A. Ordoñez

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

Climate change is a significant threat that has raised concerns all over the world. From shifting weather patterns to rising sea levels, the impact of climate change is global, and at an unprecedented scale.

Concerns about global warming have increased significantly since 2013. Climate activists across the world are now organizing protests

and non-violent civil disobedience to raise awareness around the crisis.

Be that as it may, there are people who are not concerned about the effect of climate change and it is a divisive topic all over the world. We hope this installation can bridge the gap and instill a sense of urgency about the threats facing our planet so we can mend the issues that divide us and come together to heal the Earth.

Museum of Nature of Cantabria, Spain.

Artists: ANDREA JUAN AND GABRIEL PENEDO DIEGO

Project: Our Turn To Change

THE WORK

Presented by Museum of Nature of Cantabria, Spain, the video installation appeals to the viewer, through images, to awaken to an increasingly worrying reality. Our Turn To Change deals with climate change and the consequences that these changes produce in our habitat. Nature speaks to us, screams at us...

One small drop fell and then another and another and another. Thus, drop by drop, large amounts of ice are lost every second. The poles are melting. Meanwhile, we continue on with our lives, with our dreams, as if this could never affect us. The dripping continues and vast frozen expanses have already been lost. The Arctic is at minimum levels, Antarctica has lost ice shelves, glaciers have retracted and the ocean levels continue to rise.

Forest fires, droughts, tidal waves, floods. It is our turn to change. We can still do it.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Andrea Juan was born in Argentina, has a degree in visual arts, and works with video installations, photography, and graphic art. Her artwork is based on scientific research reflecting on the environment. In 2005 she received the Guggenheim Fellowship. In this particular project Juan is collaborating with Gabriel Penedo Diego.

Skid Row Cooling Resources, Los Angeles.

Project: Recognizing Skid Row

As A Neighborhood

Curator: Tom Grode

THE WORK

Recognizing Skid Row As A Neighborhood is how DTLA 2040 (Department of City Planning) formally presented Skid Row this year to City Hall as part of updating the Downtown Community Plan. Skid Row is a dynamic, primarily African American, residential neighborhood –not a problem to be fixed. The brutal heat waves of September 2020 created Skid Row Cooling Resources, a collaborative planning effort and think tank to ensure the summer of 2021 and beyond was better for Skid Row residents. Skid Row is a unique Urban Heat Island in the larger Heat Island of Downtown Los Angeles.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Tom moved from Santa Monica to 5th and Main in May 2012, not realizing he was a block from Skid Row. Since then, he’s focused on advocacy around Skid Row as a Community. Tom is an original member of the Skid Row Cooling Resources coalition, the Skid Row Now and 2040 coalition, the Skid Row Community Improvement Coalition, and the Skid Row Arts Alliance. He is heavily engaged with Skid Row as a powerful arts community, in particular a part of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) and Urban Voices Project.

Torrance Art Museum (TAM), Torrance.

Artist: DANIELA SOBERMAN/

Installation: Memorial To The Future

Project: Wilfried Agricola de Cologne

Photographic elements: open source via TAM staff

Curator: Max Presneill

Video installations curator: Kisito Assangni

The utopianism of modernity that led to scientific and technological developments also led us towards forms of capitalism that have endangered the planet. Exploitation, excess, and greed have driven this while an ostrich-head-in-the-sand posture has characterized our approach to engaging with climate change, and the problems and potential solutions that await us in the present as much as the near future.

The formalist structure, created by Daniela Soberman, acts as the historical link to the project of Modernity and its aspirations while simultaneously reminding us of its perils and failures. Using Brutalist architecture as a reference point that encapsulates both the idealism and abject failure of this model, the collaborations, via photograph and video, highlight the need for immediate action. This project brings together 6-8 artists, in conjunction with Soberman, to explore the situation within the historical context that led us to this point of environmental catastrophe but with contemporary takes on our current position. They do this not by way of propaganda, but rather via a diversity of photographic concerns that by physical proximity in their installation on a single structure, bring together various viewpoints and interpretations of warning, of caution, of danger in respect of our environment, nature and climate.

ECOPOETICS OF GENERIC WORLD

International video program on climate change

Curated by Kisito Assangni

Climate change is arguably the most pressing socio-political issue of our time, with famine, poverty, loss of biodiversity, and mass-relocation hanging in the balance. ECOPOETICS OF GENERIC WORLD offers a range of artistic positions and responses to the dichotomy of impending climate change. The project consists of a screening that presents works by international contemporary artists working at the intersection of arts, climate change, culture and technology.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY II.

The second edition of this initiative is dedicated to exploring and raising awareness around climate change and its far-reaching effects on all areas of our lives. This program emphasizes innovative strategies to support climate action, highlighting the urgent need for collective efforts to combat environmental degradation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, it aims to engage audiences in understanding the complexities of climate change and inspire meaningful responses. A central focus of this edition is water, particularly in the context of the record-breaking drought that has gripped California. As the country’s most populous state faces decades of water shortages exacerbated by rising temperatures, groundwater depletion, and a shrinking Colorado River, it becomes imperative to address these critical issues head-on. The exhibition will delve into the multifaceted impacts of water scarcity, examining how it affects agriculture, ecosystems, and communities across the state. By showcasing artists and activists who are creatively addressing these challenges, the program aims to foster a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of climate change and water resources.

AMA / Art Museum

of the Americas of the Organization of American States / WASHINGTON D.C.

Artist: ALFREDO DE STEFANO

Project: “The Pulse of Silence” Video and Sound Installation

Curator: Fabian Goncalvez Borrega

THE WORK

Using desert images from Chile’s Atacama, Egypt’s Sahara, Iceland’s Black, India’s Thar, Peru’s Nazca, Marrueco’s Sahara, Mexico’s Sonora-Arizona and Chihuahuense, Mongolia’s Gobi, Namibia’s Namibia as well as USA’s White Sands, the artist seeks to create an immersive experience by unifying the vastness and silence present across these lands.

Silence feels like a pulse, but it’s a different pulse in each desert. Sometimes it’s a very loud pulse, Alfredo De Stefano explains.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

De Stefano is one of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary conceptual photographers. His body of work includes images of desert landscapes that address the natural environment’s elemental significance and our relationship to the land. Often employing ice, fire, and light, De Stefano creates enigmatic installations with both natural and man-made objects in ethereal desert settings.

De Stefano was born in the city of Monclova (Coahuila), located in the desert in Northeastern Mexico. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at The Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012; Fourth International Biennial of Photography, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2010; International Biennial of Guangzhou, Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, 2009 and the Museum of Art Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico, 2008. De Stefano’s monographs include In This Place, 2008, Brief Chronicles of Light, 2007 and Replenishing Emptiness, 2002. Among the institutions that have collected De Stefano’s work are The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico; Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and the FEMSA Collection, Monterrey, Mexico.

OPC Office Cultural Projects, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Artist: DAVIS BIRKS

Project: Rendezvous: Esta tierra es Mi Tierra

Curator: Laura Ayala

The moment of our appointment arrived. We are where we had feared and predicted. Through a video installation, Davis Birks offers us the possibility to activate a conversation in which we can review the past, the present and the future. It is a reflection on the environment and our impact on it. That would be a first reading.

It is observed how an organic arrangement (that of a river) is replaced by one of geometric and artificial order. This happens as the audience comes into contact with the piece. The curves and the apparent disorder in which the small stones of a river are placed and the capricious shapes with which the water flows will be replaced by a Tartan pattern. The artist chose to use this particular pattern as a reference and homage to his Scottish ancestry. The crisscrossing lines could be the axes of a GPS grid, or the interwoven linear trace of the urbanizations in which we live and that is “natural” to us. This could be a second reading.

Birks confronts us with Nature observed through a surveillance camera lens. That is why he chose black and white for the video. Nature distant and supervised, we are supervised. We = Nature. We have almost forgotten the latter. The conquest of natural territory has caused not only an impact on the environment; it has also had consequences on its original inhabitants and has led among other things, to their displacement. This could be a third reading.

These sensitive themes, or others, emerge from a narrative, apparently simple, that unfolds many layers of interpretation. What would your reading be?

ABOUT THE ARTIST

In 1985, Birks attended the Universidad Autónoma, in Guadalajara, Mexico, through a study grant. After graduating in 1986 with a BFA from Arizona State University, summa cum laude, Birks returned to Guadalajara via Puerto Vallarta and became an early proponent of contemporary art in both communities. The work of Davis Birks is defined by multiple investigations through diverse disciplines. Using sculpture, installation, painting—and more recently, photography and social practice—Birks explores a wide range of interests including social inter-relations, geo-politics, economy, the environment, and history.

Birks has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, US, Europe and A sia. His work forms part of private and public art collections including the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLaa), Long Beach; the Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH), Houston, Texas; the Santa Barbara Museum (SBMA), California; Museo de Las Artes (MUSA) and Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara.

Museum LA NEOMUDEJAR, Madrid, Spain.

Artist: CARMEN ISASI

Project: Uninhabited Video immersive installation.

Curator: Néstor Prieto

Carmen Isasi has worked on the UNINHABITED project since 2019.

During this time, not only has the immigration crisis worsened, but developed countries have also tightened their policies to stop the immigration flow into their territories.

With new, tougher immigration policies in place, immigrants have lost all hope to find a place they can call home as they embark on a dangerous, life-threatening sea journey to reach European shores. Isasi’s project features the clothes worn by immigrants on their way to Europe. Their clothes symbolize the many struggles they have faced before and during their journey: They are a testament to their lives, personal stories and country of origin.

From a critical standpoint, this proposal acts as a bridge connecting human drama to the rest of us.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carmen Isasi, a Spanish visual artist, lives and works in Madrid, where she develops an artistic practice that combines painting, printmaking, and installations.

A graduate of the Fine Arts program at the Complutense University of Madrid, she explores the relationships between collective memory and identity, drawing inspiration from both Spanish art history and contemporary issues.

Since the early 2010s, she has exhibited her work regularly in Spain and internationally, attracting a diverse audience. Recognized for her subtle use of color and the finesse of her compositions, she continues to enrich the Iberian art scene and beyond.

Kunstiniciative Wurzeln und Flügel e.V Art

Museum, Germany.

Artist: PETRA EIKO

Project: Sense of Space Project

Curator: Beate Düsterberg-Eissing Supported by Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Los Angeles

Petra Eiko’s installation immerses the viewer in a sensorial experience through six 3D sculptures and a video installation. Her work fosters a conversation on the significance of water –for both individuals and humans collectively–, as well as its impact on the future of our planet. Her work raises awareness of climate change by highlighting the fragile state of water on Earth. She explores the changes and challenges we face today, which come as the result of our endless exploitation of water supplies and natural resources, and the continued impact the industrial world has had on humans and the environment.

The organization, located at Schloss Reuschenberg in Neuss (Germany), was founded in 2004, inspired by a quote of German poet Goethe: “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings”. Undoubtedly, we all need deep roots to develop a firm foundation and strength. Wings we need to let our dreams and creativity fly.

Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles, Los Angeles.

Artist: PIETRO RUFFO in collaboration with NORUWEI

Project: IL GIARDINO PLANETARIO

(The Planetary Garden)

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

The title is inspired by French philosopher Gilles Clement. This video installation is an allegory of the planet as a garden.

Ecological finiteness makes the limits of the biosphere appear as a closed space embracing all life.

In line with the title of DIVERSEartLA, diversity in this work refers to the number of distinct living species among animals, plants and simple beings (bacteria, viruses, etc.) that currently exist in only one species: humans. Contained in this one specie’s DNA is the diverse history of other species that have inhabited this planet before us and have left their traces not only in our DNA, but also in our cultural environment and the landscape that surrounds us.

The work is presented as an analysis of the landscape that brings to light the changing character of what seems “naturally” present: from the expanse of water in a tropical forest emerges a memory of the mountainous reliefs that previously covered this place, the sparse trees of the savannah, the grass of the bovine pastures in the Alps... An organized whole, according to the possibilities offered by the survey, the exposures, the accesses and what our gaze can embrace from a peak.

The alternation of different climates has turned the environment into a carpet woven with dark and rough shapes: the forests; alternating with light surfaces, the grass that furrows the landscape animates it with curved perspectives re-launched by a gentle and deep relief. The balance of shadows and lights is driven by a dynamic whose evolutionary process one can only guess, one in which we appeared last minute, one that made us extremely complex.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Pietro Ruffo was born in 1978 in Rome and later studied architecture there. His paintings, drawings and sculptural installations reflect his intense social and moral concerns. His work uses large “maps” tracing the cultural and military influence of the world’s imperial powers.

Technical drawing and geographical maps are elaborated further through freehand drawing; his installations embrace both highly technical materials and an intensely manual practice.

The themes of colonialism and the desire for liberty led him to develop a project over the past year that addresses Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford University professor considered one of the 20th century’s strongest exponents of liberalism. Ruffo’s current project is titled “The rise of liberal thought in the U.S.A.”

MOLAA Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach.

Artist: JUDITH F. BACA (USA, 1946)

Project: When God Was A Woman, 1980-2021

Curator: Gabriela Urtiaga

Judith F Baca, in contemplation of Merlin Stone’s When God Was A Woman –an exploration of ancient worship of the female Goddess and the subsequent suppression of women’s rites–, developed a workshop process to source ideas, record dreams, and construct imagery and content emblematic of females. As a double-sided triptych, Thirteen Women in the Volcanic Eruption and The Birth of the Vision of the Heart was brought to completion in 2021, as Baca advanced these paradigms.

Thirteen Women in the Volcanic Eruption incorporates the young women who participated in the workshop into the painting, who simultaneously represent Latina and Chicana women –and all women. Their naked bodies are shown standing in the fiery lava of the volcano, displaying the palms of their hands, and in the center –the heart–, synonymous with life. All the figures emerge from the fertility of the volcano’s ashes in a fertile paradise, like a phoenix that rises from its ashes ready for a grand ceremony.

The Birth of the Vision of the Heart is a continuation of this story: the great ceremony of a ritual, a goddess possessing vital energy, Mother Earth. She stands with her hands extending into large flowering branches, her rhizomatic feet extend into deep roots, and throughout her body, blood spreads in venous threads that connect her corporeal mass with an earthly paradise and the originating source of life; a fertile pond with the most ancient forms of life.

Ecofeminist: JUDY BACA

“On the Matriarchal Mural and Its Symbols”

ReflectSpace Gallery, Glendale Library, Arts & Culture, Glendale & Culture Nomad, Seoul, Korea.

Artist: HANHO

Project: “Eternal light – 21c The Last Judgment”

Curators: Monica Hye Yeon Jun,

Ara & Anahid Oshagan

Inspired by Michelangelo’s masterpiece, The Last Judgment, artist HanHo’s Eternal light – 21c

Using traditional art techniques combined with technology, HanHo creates multi-colored light-infused immersive worlds that shift and ebb in front of your eyes. Nearly all the figures depicted in the work are the artist himself—performance, history, war, future, fantasy all meld in this massive panorama of humanity.

“Eternal Light,” as the artist calls it, bathes his canvases and elevates his worlds to near mystical proportions. Will this eternal light uplift humanity from the on- rushing climate crisis? Will we have the ability, as species, to avoid our own destruction? Who will judge us, finally? These questions undergird HanHo’s “Last Judgment” and create a space for us to contemplate them and our future.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Internationally well-known Korean artist Han Ho combines light and painting in his installation works. A participant in the 2015 Venice Biennale, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Paris 8 University and pursued a doctorate following Nam June Paik’s footsteps. Residing in Paris, New York, and Beijing, he engages in diverse artistic activities.

As a prominent media and public sculpture artist in Korea, Han Ho’s works, often centered around light, encompass painting and video. Collaborating with NASA on the 7 Million Project, he creates paintings on traditional Korean paper, puncturing holes through which he places LED bulbs, offering a healing experience through the warmth of light.

HAN Ho, an artist of light, explores various genres like painting, media painting with LED bulbs, sculpture, performance, installation, and kinetic art. His motifs revolve around eternal light, encapsulating elements of religion, world history, Korean history, self-exploration, and the humanistic base of light. The convergence of different genres produces a unique synergy across painting, media, space, installation, and video simultaneously.

Raubtier & Unicus Productions, Los Angeles.

Artists: ALEJANDRO ORDOÑEZ AND RAUBTIER & UNICUS

Project: Reactive Elements

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

Reactive Elements is an art installation dealing with the fragility our natural resources and the chain-like reactions human activities have set off on planet Earth. Through the use of a voile, –a suspended piece of fabric– and by projecting images onto it, the artist unveils an ugly reality, while providing visitors with the opportunity to come face-toface with our own individual footprint and the cumulative impact of anthropogenic activities on our environment.

The projected images are divided into four sets to represent the different elements we, as humans, actively affect: air, water, earth and fire. The universal nature of the images appeals to viewers’ sense of belonging, pushing them towards the realization we have all collectively played role in this tragic destruction and deterioration of the planet, while the volatility of the fabric dancing in the wind serves as a poignant metaphor to the fact that, due to no one else’s doing but our own, life on Earth hangs by a thread.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The focus of this edition encouraged visitors to explore the complex and evolving relationship between memory, humanity, and AI.

Memory as a fundamental aspect of the human experience, shaping our individual and collective identities and informing our understanding of the world around us.

As we enter an era of rapid technological change and increasing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider the role that AI can play in shaping our memory and our sense of humanity.

MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art, Bogotá, Colombia.

Artist: CARLOS CASTRO ARIAS

Project: Mythstories

Curator: Gustavo Adolfo Ortiz Serrano

Myths are constructed to express realities beyond a logical understanding and help us to comprehend concepts that are difficult to explain with ordinary language.

Carlos Castro’s work is located precisely where contemporary society faces a mirror but is afraid to open its eyes. Through the ancient medieval technique of tapestry and with the use of an iconography that links the ancient and the contemporary, he conceptually weaves a new understanding of our recent history with the biases of the hypercommunicated, transcultural, hybrid and eager for meaning society.

In the midst of complexity, it is necessary to appeal to myth to approach our existence in a symbolic and binding way, a resource that enhances imagination and emotion to assimilate the succession of moments that will become history.

Each of Castro’s tapestries explore the relationship between myth and history; these woven tapestries illustrate contemporary myths by interlacing imagery from medieval tapestries and twenty-first-century news media. Castro’s work is also an invitation to create or recreate our own myths, those that allow us to transcend experience to redefine culture and the social meaning that is implicit in it.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carlos Castro Arias (born 1981) is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist and professor at (SDSU).

Castro was born in Bogotá, Colombia. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Jorge Lozano in Bogotá in 2002.

Past is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past. (2024) Exhibition view of Castro’s solo show at Museo de Arte Moderno MamBO, Bogotá. Castro’s work has been exhibited and recognized internationally at different occasions in the course of his career.

He has staged solo shows in galleries and museums across South America, Europe and the United States. Among his notable solo exhibitions include: El pasado nunca muere, no es ni siquiera pasado at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá MamBo in 2024 and La vida de las cosas muertas at Museo Universidad de Antioquia in 2022.

NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART, Reno, Nevada

Artist: GUILLERMO BERT

Project: The Journey

Curator: Vivian Zavataro

The Warriors are life-sized, laser-cut, wooden sculptures set in an environment that resembles a harsh desert landscape. Inspired by the 2,200-year-old Chinese Terracotta Warriors – 8,000 life-sized soldier statues excavated in Shaanxi province in 1974, Bert’s vision was to honor the warriors of our time by creating an army of immigrant heroes.

The relationship between the individual and the collective group is apparent in the installation. Seen individually, the modernday warriors are strong and proud, but when viewed together – and multiplied in the surrounding mirrors – they become an overwhelming and forceful army.

All the individuals depicted represent real people with real names –David, Alex, Margarita, Nalleli, Eduardo, Sabrina, and others – who stood at the forefront during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Bert encourages us to think about the invisibility of Latinx workers, including nurses, farmers, firefighters, and activists, who kept the American economy thriving when most of the world stayed home.

A visual tribute to strength and dedication, The Warriors pay homage to these fighters, acknowledging their courage, resilience, and warrior spirit.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Guillermo Bert was born in Santiago, Chile in 1959. His bio cultural experience provides him with a lived perspective from witch his artistic expression is cultivated.

Bert combines his decades-long practice of working with cultural symbols of urbanism, consumerism and displacement- dating back to his 1990’s iterations of street level bricolage that delved into the urban archeology of street posters along Los Angeles’s skid road. He collaborated with the indigenous Mapuche community traditional weavers.

MOAH LANCASTER MUSEUM OF ART AND HISTORY, LANCASTER

Artist: OSCEOLA REFETOFF

Project: Repairing the Future

Performance: Hibiscus TV artists Kaye Freeman and Amy Kaps

Curator: Andi Campognone

Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) is proud to present Osceola Refetoff: Repairing the Future, a multi-media exhibition focusing on global sea level rise. The centerpiece of the installation is a large-scale immersive audio-visual projection of the artist’s 8-minute film, Sea of Change.

The film’s original footage was shot by Refetoff in Svalbard, Norway, near the North Pole during his The Arctic Circle Artist & Scientist Residency. These visuals are paired with NASA satellite images of the Earth and graphics depicting NASA’s scientific measurements of current climate disruptions. AI-generated animation envisions possible future climate outcomes.

The project was edited with Juri Koll during Refetoff’s 2023 artist residency at Building Bridges Art Exchange in collaboration with Dr. Eric

Larour, manager of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The original soundtrack is written and performed by awardwinning composer Paul Cantelon and Sultan + Shepard.

Blending hard science, documentary video, and impressionistic imaginaries, Refetoff is known for using aesthetic strategies to define and communicate an urgent need for both personal and systemic engagement, leveraging the natural beauty of remote regions to command our global attention toward local climate issues.

The exhibition wasa accompanied by a performance from Hibiscus TV artists Kaye Freeman and Amy Kaps, and included a talk with Refetoff, curator Andi Campognone, and Rosanna Xia, L.A. Times climate journalist and author of California Against the Sea.

RAUBTIER & UNICOS PRODUCTIONS, Los Angeles

Artist: RAUBTIER & UNICOS PRODUCTION

Project: Bridging emotional and digital landscapes.

Curator: Marisa

Caichiolo

This exhibition explores the intersection of human emotion and advanced digital technology to create a thought-provoking digital mural of individual and collective experiences. Through the utilization of AI-driven word-to-image conversion, tangible printing, and large-scale projections, the artists are seeking to reveal the evolving correlation between personal memories and moments and their emotional and physical manifestations.

Visitors are encouraged to engage with a touchscreen interface to input words or phrases that resonate with their emotions and memories.

These contributions are then projected onto a wall, forming a dynamic word-cloud art display that evolves as new submissions are added. The collective impact of societal connections is visually represented as frequently repeated phrases gain prominence through boldness within the projection, reflecting the shared experiences of the community.

Simultaneously, each visitor’s input undergoes processing by an AI program, resulting in the creation of a unique image corresponding to the submitted words or phrases. These personalized images are then printed and made available for visitors to take home, serving as tangible representations of their individual contributions to the evolving artwork.

This immersive exhibition invites audiences to contemplate the fluid transition from abstract emotional states to concrete visual representations, while also highlighting the interconnected nature of individual and collective human experiences. As the exhibition progresses, it builds upon itself, capturing a collective snapshot in time and weaving a historical narrative that embodies the convergence of emotional and rational realm.

MUSA MUSEUM OF ART UNIVERSITY OF GUADALAJARA, GRODMAN

LEGACY and GUADALAJARA FOUNDATION

Guadalajara, Mexico.

Project: Fake memory of a True past

Curator: Moises Schiaffino

This project seeks to create a reflection on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to generate a historical archive. Currently, what we know about history is thanks to the vestiges and testimonies that humans themselves have left and recorded.

Our conception of yesterday depends on that legacy, but what would happen if in the future the account of what happened was in the hands of a virtual entity? Would the vision of the past be the same?

This video installation tells the same story from two different visions: the human and the artificial, making a visual comparison of the memory that the human being has preserved with the one that, through algorithms, the AI has generated. Thus, the substantiated testimony and the speculative recreation will be confronted before the eyes of those who observe it, leaving the door open for reflection about the importance of writing our history by ourselves, so the truth about it could be as faithful as possible of what happened in reality.

With this project, we will delve into the history of the University of Guadalajara and pay tribute to Raúl Padilla López, the most important cultural promoter and visionary that this institution has had and who promoted the creation of the MUSA Museum of Arts in 1994.

AAL MUSEUM Santiago, Chile.

Artist: ANTUAN

Project: Be Water

Curator: Marisa Caichiolo

The immersive installation “Be Water” presents a visual narrative that delves into the multifaceted dimensions of water in nature and human life. Antuan’s creation of the Human Net, a human geometric structure visible in each sculptural piece, symbolizes the symmetry of the universe, elemental purity, and omnipresent wisdom. The characters within the installation represent the unity of humanity in the face of the urgent need to address the global water crisis, highlighting the essential collaboration between humanity and AI to create a new network of human consciousness. This interconnectedness is crucial in working collectively to tackle the challenges posed by the water crisis and establish a new order for the planet.

The installation places a particular emphasis on the intrinsic memory of water and explores how AI can effectively convey the significance of this vital element to humanity. This exploration seamlessly integrates art, science, space, metaphysics, energy, and the compassionate stewardship of our planet. By captivating audiences, “Be Water” aims to inspire a reconsideration of our relationship with water, shedding light on its potential to heal and sustain us through its memory. The “Be Water” installation represents a significant milestone in the ongoing art-science research led by the esteemed contemporary artist, Antuan.

Building upon the success of the acclaimed project, “The Other Dimension,” which was showcased in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL in 2017, “Be Water” continues to push the boundaries of artistic expression and scientific exploration.

RED LINE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, Denver, Colorado.

Artist: CHRIS COLEMAN

Project: Threaded Tracing

Curator: Louise Martorano

Threaded Tracing uses current computer vision technology (LiDAR) to encode natural and human made spaces into digital memory. Made during visits to forests and airports across the US, it plays with the idea of how we remember time and space vs how computers try to represent and process it. As we feed more and more of our lives into AI systems, we must continue to ask what is lost in translation.

Music by George Cicci.

RED LINE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, Denver, Colorado.

Artist: LALEH MEHRAN

Project: Entropic Systems

Curator: Louise Martorano

Laleh Mehran’s Entropic Systems is an immersive installation that considers the politicization of ideologies, dictating responses to activities outside and within its borders. Analogous to doctrines imposed by governments or systems on people, the “drawing” machine seeks to instill pattern and order, operating hypnotically and rhythmically.

In this work, the machine inscribes a sort of memory into the mineral bed, much like a rudimentary hard drive. Each day the past is erased, but at the same time, the grains will never sit the same again, containing remains of history much in the way that AI is trained with billions of words and yet “remembers” none of them.

DIVERSEartLA is about

Collectors’ Conversations

Performances

Community Engagement

Education

Installations

Art interventions

Video Art

Art & Technology

Curators talks

Museum Adquisición Award

“AMA’s participation in DIVERSEartLA’s LA Art Show in 2020 and 2021 has had a positive impact on the diffusion of the museum’s mission and vision, not only in the United States west coast, but internationally. This has also helped to propel the international reach of photographic, video, and performance artists from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, USA, and Venezuela. DIVERSEartLA promotes a cross-fertilization among museums and international institutions that would not be possible for the AMA on its own. We at AMA hold DIVERSEartLA in the highest regard for its commitment to diversity, and for the high artistic standards of its curator and organizers. AMA would like to thank DIVERSEartLA and the LA Art Show for its commitment to preserving and promoting contemporary art.”

AMA Museum of the Americas, Washington.

“It was an honor for me to be exhibiting together with so relevant Artists and Institutions of different countries. Also, it was for me so great to collaborate with the Museums Mumbat and Antonio Serrano of Argentina.

I want to congratulate the organization according to everything they have done to make me feel always great. The exhibition room was really great allowing me to have the chance to exhibit my work in the best conditions.

Also, I want to remark the work of the Curator Marisa Caichiolo who was always collaborating with me helping me in everything I needed to make this project possible. If my artwork was the project you could enjoy it was thanks to her advice, support and assistance.” Guillermo Vezzosi, Artist.

“DIVERSEartLA was a wonderful experience for me. The attention from the organizers was extraordinary, and also from the staff.

Excellent mounting support. It was a first class Art Fair.”

Claudia Rodriguez, Artist.

DIVERSEartLA 2017-2024

LACMA Museum, Los Angeles

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles

MUSA Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico

ART SHARE LA, Los Angeles

Los Angeles Art Association, Los Angeles

Launch LA, Los Angeles

MOLAA Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach

AAL, Arte Al Limite, Chile

CCK Art Center, Argentina

Japanese American Museum, Los Angeles

La Neomudejar Museum, Spain

AMA, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington

DANUBIANA Museum, Bratislava

THE BROAD Museum, Los Angeles

Women Voices Now, Los Angeles

NOW ART LA, Los Angeles

MASM, San Marcos Museum, Perú

TAM Museum, Torrance

Skid Road Museum, Los Angeles

Urban Voices Now

Museum Of Nature, Cantabria, Spain

MCA Museum of Environmental Science, Guadalajara, Mexico

DOX Contemporary Arts Center, Prague, Czech Republic

and many more.

Artists Guest Curators

Marta Minujin/ Argentina

Carlos Martiel/ Cuba

Dorian Wood/ Los Angeles

Rafael Montañez Ortiz/ Los Angeles

Antuan/ Cuba

Daniel Joseph Martinez /Los Angeles

Sarah Trouch/ France

Taiji Terasaki/ Japan

Tiffany Trenda/ Los Angeles

Carmen Argote/ Mexico

Bernardo Oyarzún/ Chile

Enrique Ramirez/ Chile

Chiachio & Giannone/ Argentina

Viktor Freso/ Bratislava

Gronk/ Los Angeles

Angie Bonino/ Perú

Ana Marcos/ Spain

Claudia Rodriguez/ Mexico

Marcos Lutyens/ Los Angeles

Luis Cobelo/ Venezuela

Norton Maza / Chile and many more.

Mar Hollingsworth / Los Angeles

Chon Noriega/ Los Angeles

Laura Ayala/ Mexico

Carlos Ortega/ Los Angeles

Gabriela Urtiaga/ Argentina

Elisa Massardo/ Chile

Daniel Alfonso/ Peru

Britt Salvesen/ Los Angeles

Jesse Damiani/ Los Angeles

Peter Mays/ Los Angeles

Nestor Prieto/ Spain

Fabian Goncalvez/ Washington

Kisito Assangni/ France

Max Presneill/ Los Angeles

Tom Grode/ Los Angeles

Indiana Gnocchini/ Argentina

James Panozzo/ Los Angeles

Gustavo Adolfo Ortiz Serrano/ Colombia

Moises Schiaffino / México

Andi Campognone / Los Angeles

Louise Martorano/ Denver

Monica Hye Yeon Jun / Korea

Ara & Anahid Oshagan / Los Angeles

LA ART SHOW - Producer/Director

DIVERSEartLA - Curator

Cultural Partners