CURATORIAL
Mud Kin: Mapping Indigenous & Latinx Projects from Southern California to West Texas
ARTISTS: Camille Hoffman, Joanna Keane Lopez, William Camargo, Alyssa Chandelle, Sandro Canovas, Carlos Jaramillo, Jazmin Garcia, Ozzie Juarez, Ronald Rael, Reyes Padilla, Arlene Mejorado, Daisy Quezada Ureña, Cougar Vigil, Jose Villalobos, Ernesto Yerena Montejano.
Ongoing project curated by Tracy Fenix
Exhibition assistants, Alice Zhao & Jordan Gonzales
Documentation by Arlene Mejorado
ONGOING curatorial MAPPING PROJECT
First cohort exhibition: July 16- July 28, 2022
A contemporary cohort of Indigenous and Latinx artists and activists working in the southwestern United States are engaging with ancestral adobe structures and construction to resist artistic, cultural, and ecological assimilation. Predominant expressions of land-based art and environmental activism in the US have historically ignored Indigenous and Latinx contributions, and at the same time, acquiring critical reception or scholarly notice has been tied to the whitewashing of cultural signifiers. These artists and activists preserve ancestral adobe practices to keep its roots within Indigenous heritage while promoting its inclusion to canonical land-based artworks and also promoting its environmental sustainability in the deserts of the Southwest.
Through the creation and care of adobe-based art and infrastructure, they are staging interventions against displacement and a loss of cultural memory caused by settler colonialism and other oppressive regimes of power. This thesis charts how these artists use adobe to create physical and imagined homes of resistance, threading within it a subjective narrative through the ancestral lands of First Nation and Mexican people in the southwestern United States, to reorient future scholarship on land-based art and activism toward its ancestral, Indigenous coordinates--those of community belonging and ecological sustainability.
It’s also one component of a larger “Mud Kin” project that will encompass an archive of interviews and photographs and other interventions that express Indigenous placekeeping, as well as an exhibition, a publication, and an interactive mapping tool (to be released in March 2025).
PORTALS at The CLEMENTE, NY, NY
October 23, 2024 - February 28, 2025
"Portals" showcases 11 artists exploring ancestral connections through mixed media, new media, and ecological practices across generations. The exhibit highlights themes of temporality, migration, and healing, emphasizing both ecological repair and the complexities of traumatic intimacies embodied in daily rasquache architectures and materiality over time. It envisions Indigenous and diasporic futures that foster agency, self-determination, and creative expansion.
Artists: Sabrina Barrios, Nube Cruz, Lucia Cozzi, Julia Justo, Miguel Martinez, Michael Pribich, Denisse Reyes, Xavier Robles, Gabrielle Vazquez, Elizabeth Velazquez, and Erick Zambrano.
we are CLOSE IN DISTANCE
November 4, 2022 - December 2, 2022
USC Mateo Gallery, LA, CA
We Are Close in Distance considers how physical, temporal, and archival space has the power to unite, as well as to divide, through the excavation of interpersonal, intergenerational, and spatial intimacies. The participating artists comprise a diverse and multigenerational group of artistic voices. Working across media including painting, photography, poetry, performance, video, sculpture, and zines, the exhibition's artists explore how intimacies are constructed, broken down, and reclaimed in a culmination of the continuously unfolding present and lingering past. By investigating the poetics of fleeting closeness from personal and cultural perspectives, the exhibition excavates the contested nature of legacies and diasporas. Challenging conceptions of our relationships with one another and between generations,
We Are Close in Distance considers how art can illuminate often overlooked relationalities. The exhibition spans two spaces at the USC Roski Graduate Building in the Los Angeles Arts District. Gallery North foregrounds video, poetry, installation, and pictorial mediums, while Gallery South primarily houses zines, as well as malleable and ephemeral forms. The exhibition’s spatial breadth complements the expansive range of media present and serves as a comprehensive site of interactive opportunities for viewers. We Are Close in Distance empowers participants to question how one can care for and nourish their communities through art, performance, and ephemera.
Exhibited artists: Sadie Barnette, Edwin Bodney, Tonya Ingram, Amanda Gentry, Carl George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ross Laycock, Ozzie Juarez, Vishal Jugdeo, Jose Guadalupe Sanchez III, Anna Sergeeva, Ron Tarver, Joey Terrill, Xirin, and Diana Zeng.
DAYS OF RAGE, ONE INSTITUTE, LA, CA
Days of Rage, an online multimedia exhibit featuring newly digitized LGBTQ+ activist posters from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
Days of Rage engages with historical LGBTQ+ activist posters by looking to the lived histories and experiences of six activists and graphic designers: graphic designer and founder of BLK Alan Bell, designer and artist Daniel Hyo Kim, HIV/AIDS and trans activist Chandi Moore, designer and educator Silas Munro, activist and photographer Judy Ornelas Sisneros, and activist Jordan Peimer. These LGBTQ+ community experts each reflect on the posters in a series of stylized videos that emphasize the choreography of their hands along with audio stories and commentary. From bold graphic declarations of community activation to explicit safer sex health campaigns, the selected posters run the affective gamut, bringing up powerful feelings of rage, joy, and sorrow.
Days of Rage is curated by Andy Campbell, Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts, and co-curated by Tracy Fenix and Austen Villacis, USC MA Curatorial Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere alumni.
OUTCASTS, WAVE HILL, BRONX, NY
April 8 2017 - July 9, 2017
The prolific oeuvre of artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009), who took these “outcasts” under her wing by creating a figurative cast of characters to populate her scroll and wall paintings, is the impetus for Outcasts: Women in the Wilderness. A selection of her works on paper will be featured alongside paintings, sculpture, photographs and video by the work of more than a dozen artists born in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Recreating a mix of multiple historical narratives, ancient mythologies and contemporary events, Nancy Spero focused on the female figure as protagonist. Three themes that emerge from her work are explored in Outcasts: finding a voice, the process of constructing multiple perspectives on female identity; hybrid alternatives to the status quo, harnessing ancient and modern mythologies to subvert the established social and cultural order; and healing and empowerment as pathways to resistance, inclusiveness and recovery from loss and trauma.
Artists: Samira Abbassy, Jaishri Abichandani, Huma Bhabha, Chitra Ganesh, Scherezade Garcia, Mariam Ghani, Kris Grey, Fay Ku, Tracey Moffatt, Zanele Muholi, Marie Watt, Yee I-Lann.
Exhibition organized by guest curators Deborah Frizzell and Harry J. Weil, and by Wave Hill Senior Curator Jennifer McGregor, Curator of Visual Arts Gabriel de Guzman, and curatorial assistance by Tracy Fenix.
Exhibition Project Management
Simone Leigh, CAAM, May 2024
Simone Leigh, a traveling exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) and co-presented in Los Angeles by the California African American Museum (CAAM) and the Los Angeles County of Museum of Art (LACMA), is the first comprehensive survey of the richly layered work of this celebrated artist. CAAM’s presentation, which includes works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation, features nearly twenty years of Leigh’s practice in ceramics, bronze, video, installation, and social activation. Together, these works index a web of Black feminist theory, archival excavation, infrastructures for mutual care, and African art and architecture. Accompanied by a major monograph, this exhibition offers visitors a timely opportunity to gaze at Leigh’s artistic, scholarly, and social contributions, inspired by legacies of creativity, survival, and documentation by Black femmes throughout the world.
Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA), with Anni A. Pullagura, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. The Los Angeles presentation is organized by Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, and Naima J. Keith, Vice President, Education and Public Programs, LACMA, and Taylor Renee Aldridge, Visual Arts Curator, CAAM. CAAM Exhibition Project Management by Tracy Fenix & Curatorial Co.
World without end: GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER PROJECT
CAAM, LA, CA, Sept 2024
Co-curated by Executive Director, Cameron Shaw & Yael Lipschitz
World Without End” exhibit that explores how contemporary artists and thinkers working today engage with George Washington Carver’s ideas and interests as a scientist, artist, educator, and activist. Alongside contemporary artworks, the exhibition features rarely seen archival material, including Carver’s paintings, drawings, laboratory equipment, mycology and notebooks.
George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. In the early 1900s, he built his “Jesup Wagon,” a moveable school to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—including organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and plant-based medicines and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservation. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings.
Featured artists: Terry Adkins, Ash Arder, Julie Beeler, William Padilla Brown, Kevin Beasley, Diedrick Brackens, John Cage, Colectivo Cambalache, Robert Colescott, Abigail DeVille, Linda Dounia, Karon Davis, Charles Gaines, Terrick Gutierrez & Michelle White, Candice Lin, Nour Mobarek, Sam Shoemaker, Tavares Strachen, Henry Taylor, Hana Ward, Jack Whitten, Amanda Williams, Judson Powell, Sheila Pree, Alicia Piller, Mimi Onouha, James Lewis, & Noah Purifoy.
Exhibition design by Marci Boudreau, exhibition project management by Tracy Fenix, A/V specialist by Pierre Briet, and art handling by Curatorial Co.