“For us, stories are living beings,” writes Nemonte Nenquimo in the introduction of her memoir, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People, co-written with her husband, and fellow activist Mitch Anderson, “A story dies when no one tells it.”

“This book centers my thoughts: how I look at evangelicals, how I look at white people,” Nenquimo shares with me over a video call while on a family vacation with her in-laws in Petaluma, California, a drawing of a densely populated jungle hanging behind the white couch Nemonte sits in with her husband and children. We Will Be Jaguars, released in the U.S. on September 17, is a testimony of her upbringing. “I asked my dad, ‘How about sharing our collective struggle? Our memory. Making the world understand is necessary,” she recalls. “We began remembering with my dad, my mom, my brothers, aunts. Many times, evangelicals, and anthropologists have given their perspectives. But no one has written, our memory, the true history.”

Nemonte Nenquimo is among the world’s most recognized Indigenous climate activists. On April 23, 2019, she was the lead plaintiff in a landmark suit against the Ecuadorian government’s planned auction of Waorani land to oil companies. After a three-day trial, the verdict stated that the government had conducted a faulty consultation process with the community prior to putting their territory up for sale. Under the leadership of Nenquimo, the Waorani people asserted their right for self-determination, culminating in the protection of half a million acres of their rainforest. On April 26, hundreds of Waorani flocked to Puyo, Ecuador, streaks of achiote red pigments adorning their eyes and declared them Waorani. They had won over a system that long deemed them voiceless.

Nenquimo was born in 1985 deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a member of the Waorani tribe. It was among the last tribes to be contacted by American missionaries in the 1950s and known for resisting previous contact attempts. Experiences and life stories like Nenquimo’s have been told by anthropologists and other outsiders looking in for far too long. Nenquimo achieves a monumental feat in reversing colonial narratives, using the written word to center generations of Waorani cosmovision. It joins the company of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami’s 2010 memoir documenting his life story as a shaman and Yanomami spokesperson and the cosmo-ecological thought of the Yanomami in the Brazilian Amazon.

The book serves as both a recollection of a people and a coming-of-age tale covering nearly three decades of her community, from the early 1990s through 2019, from the first time Nemonte sees a plane land near the Curaray River to the ever-rising tensions between settler evangelicals and nearby oil companies in the last decade. Youth and elders can either accept missionary hymns, Western clothing, and work for the oil companies or find forms of fighting back. Some flee their land while others accept employment, but in the end, they must all come together in response to the oil companies’ poisoning of their water supply.

For Nemonte, the process of remembering her adolescence meant confronting deeply painful memories she had long repressed. At 14, Nenquimo left Nemompare for the first time to study with an evangelical missionary group in Quito. She writes from a place of empowerment with women in mind as she recounts stories of sexual abuse and her journey towards unlearning prejudiced viewpoints held by the so-called “civilized” world. Naming the harm became a step on the journey to healing and transformation. “It was a difficult process of remembering,” Nemonte says. “I kept so many things hidden for so long”

By far, the hardest memories to unearth pertained to her late brother Victor or Mengatowe. “It was very emotional to talk about him and then listen to the stories. I went to the waterfall crying and asking Victor to join me and help me to write this book so that everyone can see mother nature,” explains Nenquimo.

With Victor’s blessing, Nenquimo expresses an urgent message: “How can I make the world respect Waorani, respect mother nature? Many elders say, ‘outsiders know more about destruction than the jungle.’ We need to remind cityfolk that they are also connected to the earth, connected to the air, connected to the water.”

We Will Be Jaguars arose from years of early-morning conversations with Anderson. A few days before the birth of their son Sol, Nemonte began sharing stories with her husband. Guided by generations of oral tradition, Nemonte would recite while Mitch would transcribe. Over the next two years, the two collected enough stories from Nemonte, friends, and loved ones to begin weaving a tapestry of the Waorani people. She insists that Mitch is not a translator, “My husband lives in our territory. He is one of the activists that works and fights with us. We’ve learned from him, just like he has learned from us.” Mitch is the founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines and has long worked with Indigenous nations throughout the Amazon to defend their rights to land, life and cultural survival. During our interview, Mitch distracts their two kids Sol and Daime while Nemonte tells me her recent dreams. It’s a small glimpse into their partnership.

As its title suggests, We Will Be Jaguars asserts the future without erasing the past. It is a promise towards reclaiming and amplifying Waorani knowledge—a self-documented celebration of the tribe’s rich history and culture. Importantly, as so many of us watch, all but frozen with fear, as our world seems to be inevitably consumed by rising tides, burning forests, and deepening inequalities, We Will Be Jaguars is a portrait of the modern revolutionary activism undertaken by Nemonte and her husband, peers, and ancestors. Our task is to listen with humility, then ask ourselves: What action can we take now?

Over a Zoom video call from his Los Angeles studio, Joey Terrill confesses, “I want people to know I tried my best.” His humility reflects his commitment to serving his communities. Throughout a career spanning nearly five decades, Terrill has explored the intersection of his Chicanidad and queerness. As an artist, activist, and health educator, Terrill emerged in the ’70s, actively participating in the gay liberation and Chicano movements. At a time when these worlds felt disparate, Terrill worked to bridge the gap between them, tenderly humanizing what it meant to be Chicano and gay and later what it meant to live through the AIDS/HIV crisis and memorialize fallen loved ones. He did so through community-focused work and his art. Through canvas, zines, and mail art, he blends his lived experiences with a DIY ethic, pop-inflected forms, humor, and irreverence.

Born in Los Angeles in 1955, Terrill grew up in the neighborhoods of Lincoln Heights, Highland Park, and Echo Park. From an early age, Terrill was drawn to Mad Magazine, comic strips, and cartoons, despite the characters never resembling him. He attended Cathedral High School, an all-boys school, and later Immaculate Heart College in 1973, home to a renowned printmaking program made famous by Sister Corita Kent. It was there that Terrill trained in the visual legacies of pop art.

Around the same time, Terrill attended Friday Night Gay Funky Dances at Troupers Hall on La Brea Avenue, south of Hollywood Boulevard. There, he met fellow artists and lifelong collaborators like Mundo Meza, Gronk, and Patssi Valdes. In the glam dance hall miles away from their homes, the seeds for intimate friendships and love were sown. However, Terrill understood the divide between Hollywood and East Los Angeles was more than physical. Hollywood was a predominantly white gay space, while East Los Angeles was shaped by Chicanismo, a movement influenced by heteronormative machismo. In a recent interview for Hyperallergic, Terrill explains, “I was living in two worlds: one in Hollywood and one on the Eastside. And I was determined to confront and blend the two in my art.”

Terrill’s fusion of Chicanidad and queer culture was not bound to a single medium. In 1975, he designed t-shirts emblazoned with the words “dyke” and “faggot” for a demonstration. Marchers formed a visible cadre reclaiming public space and pejorative slurs. The following year, he expanded his concept with a series of t-shirts with the words “malflora” (a Spanish pejorative term for a lesbian meaning “dirty flower”) and “maricón” (the Spanish counterpart to faggot), while the backside read “Rolemodel.” This time, the t-shirts were exclusively worn by the artists and friends known as the Escandalosas as a testament to Chicanx active participation in the emerging gay and lesbian activism of the 1970s. In doing so, Terrill and his collaborators explored the possibilities that self-presentation, adornment, and embodiment could offer. It was Chicanidad within a queer context. Handwritten in an old English Gothic script associated with Cholx culture, Terrill was also addressing machismo and homophobia in Chicano culture. His work in queering the Chicano homeboy aesthetic was just beginning.

In 1978, Terrill released the first issue of Homeboy Beautiful, a self-published magazine that addressed machismo and homophobia in the Chicano cholo culture. With biting humor, the issue included beauty tips, an “Ask Lil Loca” advice column, and a mock investigative piece exposing the epidemic of “homo-homeboys” in East Los Angeles. Friends and collaborators like Teddy Sandoval appeared on the pages of Homeboy Beautiful in photographs or as characters in narratives. Joey admired the expressive practices characteristic of the Chicano homeboy culture—the calligraphy, baggy khaki pants—but in his magazine, these elements were delinked from homophobia. Across both issues of the magazine, radical queer sexual politics stood at the forefront.

Although a third issue never materialized, Homeboy Beautiful circulated through Los Angeles queer networks and beyond. Terrill shared copies with Ray Johnson in New York, often regarded as one of the originators of mail art in the United States. More than a magazine or mail art, Homeboy Beautiful serves as a historical document of a network of queer artists and their contributions to print culture from an unapologetically queer perspective.

“I had this feeling that the party time of the ’70s was coming to a close, and the ’80s were going to be different,” Terrill confesses. After some time in New York, Terrill returned to Los Angeles at the height of the AIDS crisis. “Once HIV and AIDS hit, my work shifted towards focusing on that impact on our community.” The artist contributed as best he could, from joining Act Up demonstrations and participating in legislative visits to working in hospice care for AIDS patients.

In 1989, Terrill was diagnosed with HIV, and his art and activism reflected this new reality. That year, he published Chicos Modernos, an educational safe-sex comic tailored towards Spanish-speaking hustlers and sex workers in Hollywood. Terrill’s comic communicated vital information about safe sex and dating to a community devoid of Spanish information and resources. At a time when tabloid journalism sensationalized ill-stricken bodies, Terrill’s representation of AIDS prioritized a humanistic sensibility. Portraits of friends and loved ones were bright, intimate, filled with love and beauty.

After starting a trial for Crixivan in 1997, Terrill began his still-life paintings, an ongoing series that centers his HIV/AIDS medication on a kitchen table surrounded by everyday items. Foregrounded by a table with a colorful sarape, his still-life series depicts household objects along with his HIV medication. “My goal was to have people that weren’t involved in HIV or AIDS that had fears or biases towards AIDS, to be able to look at the medication in a familiar site,” shares Terrill.

A household name in the Chicano art world, it took decades before the broader art world caught up with Terrill’s work. “I was turned down maybe by at least four galleries throughout 15 years. They would inform me that my work is either “too gay, too queer, or very Latino.” That all changed thanks to the 2017 exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., co-curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz. Hailed as the first historical exhibition on LGBTQ Latina/o artists ever organized, the exhibition introduced audiences to lesser-known histories.

Since then, Terrill has been busy keeping up with exhibition requests and new work. After 19 years of service at Global Advocacy and Partnership for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Terrill retired from his director role in 2021 to focus on his art practice. He is currently represented by two galleries: Ortuzar Projects in New York and Marc Selwyn in Los Angeles.

At 69, Joey Terrill has been HIV-positive for 44 years, and nothing can stop him. He remains the keeper of his friends and loved ones who are no longer here to share their stories. He will continue his still-life series until there is a cure or he dies, “whichever comes first.”

Xochitl Gonzalez is quite busy. Last year she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Commentary, for her work as a columnist for The Atlantic and she recently wrapped up a national book tour for her latest novel, “Anita de Monte Laughs Last.” If it’s anything like her debut novel, “Olga Dies Dreaming,” it’s sure to be a hit. She has already received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even Reese Witherspoon, who selected it for her book club. While she has garnered critical acclaim, Xochitl Gonzalez unequivocally writes about and with Latinas in mind; for those who have felt outside of things and for those whose history we may need to recover.

Gonzalez dedicates her latest novel to “Ana:” Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American artist whose life was cut short and creative output overlooked. As well as to “all the women who endured solitude never knowing the rest of us were out there.” Inspired by her own experiences and Mendieta’s life, the 47-year-old author offers us a window into the ivory towers of the art world and academia.

In 1998, Raquel Toro is a third-year art history student at the prestigious Brown University. In contrast to her peers who have family connections to museums and academia, Toro’s mother works concessions at The Met. Struggling with feelings of being an outsider looking in, Raquel finds solace and connection upon uncovering the forgotten work of Anita de Monte. In 1985, Monte, was a rising star in the art world, only to die suddenly after falling from her husband’s high-rise apartment.

“Ana [Mendieta] was the [inspiration] for Anita; she was the artist I first discovered who made me realize that there was so much I wasn’t being taught,” shares Gonzalez over email. Active from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, Mendieta was a Cuban-born artist best known for her earth-body artwork exploring her body’s relationship to the earth. Her legacy today is as much about her feminist art practice as it is about her tragic death, on September 8, 1985, in New York City, when she fell from her 34th-floor apartment. At the time of her death, Mendieta had been married to fellow artist Carl Andre. He was subsequently charged with her murder but was eventually acquitted. The trial famously split the city’s art scene into two camps. Carl Andre’s death earlier this year reignited the polarizing debate within the art world.

In her novel, Gonzalez does not shy away from Ana’s untimely death. “I was tormented by how, because of legal reasons, (her husband had been acquitted after 2 mistrials) no one could just say what seemed so obvious to me: she was murdered. I felt that fiction could be a way to use that biography and give voice to the crime. What happened that night, and in the aftermath, without having to hedge. That felt like a form of justice for her,” confesses Gonzalez.

The story’s premise came to Gonzalez after she entered the television industry. As her writing career was taking off, she began working on a TV adaptation of “Olga.” “Getting Latina stories told in film and television is so challenging.” Her experience working in TV echoed those feelings of being a Latina at Brown University, in the 90s, studying art history. “I found myself wondering how my worldview and confidence might have been different had I gotten to see anyone in my curriculum who was remotely like me,” says Gonzalez.

In “Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” de Monte’s legacy has long been buried by her husband’s successful career. The book alternates between its dual protagonists, traveling through time as they share their perspectives of similar journeys: one an artist, another an aspiring art historian. Both Latinas experience power imbalances in their romantic relationships and the art world.

Through the alternating timelines in “Anita,” Gonzalez creates intergenerational lineages in academia, and honors those who came before us. “For women of color and marginalized people in general, so often we are made to feel that we are the first people to do something or to try something. But often, it’s just that the person who came before us—their experience, their history—isn’t available to us. Either because that history was erased, or because the barriers to entry for marginalized people are so great. Large swaths of time might have gone by between our predecessor’s experience and ours. We have no continuity. We don’t get to benefit from accumulated knowledge of a path—each generation is left to feel like they are starting from scratch.”

Xochitl Gonzalez’s book is not just a book about the art world. She evokes the loneliness of a newcomer in a foreign space, whether it be a new country, corporate America, or academia, while also imagining what is possible when we build bridges for the next generation. In a political climate fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric and rampant xenophobia, we might be emboldened if we know that someone has survived a similar experience. “Anita’s ability to transverse time and space from beyond was a nod to something that we can all access—the unnamed and unknown ancestors and guardians whose specific lives and struggles we might not know, but who can still provide us strength in the here and now.”

Jean-Pierre Villafañe’s work might make you blush, smile or look twice. The New York City artist is rapidly gaining prominence. At this year’s Armory Show, he was awarded The Present Prize for outstanding booth with Embajada Gallery. At the upscale New York City bar Cecchi’s, his figures dance jovially over diners’ heads. In his paintings, Villafañe profoundly explores the relationship between performance and life. His work – at times sensuous and indulgent – satirizes social constructions of the self. The thirty-year-old artist dramatically envisions the escape from the seriousness and decorum of everyday life in favor of delightful debauchery.

Villafañe’s journey in the creative field began off the canvas. He received his BFA from Savannah College of Arts and Design in 2016 before moving to New York City to pursue a Master’s in Architecture at Columbia University. “During my transition from architecture to painting, you see a lot more geometrical rectilinear-like shapes [in my work]” says Villafañe, from his New York studio. Over a virtual studio visit, he shares that his self-taught artistic journey began with abstract painting, which slowly morphed into cubist figural paintings. His current figural style is characterized by elongated limbs, fragmented bodies, and sharp shadows.

Equally as important to the artist’s work is his lived environment. Born in Puerto Rico, the island’s annual festivals were his first encounter with people from all walks of life coming together to celebrate. “I’ve always thought about the carnivalesque nature of the Latin culture – we have a lot of carnivals in every Latin American country” says Villafañe. Once he moved to New York City, the carnivalian energy in the city’s merging cultures played out in front of him like theater. Through Villafañe’s eyes, New Yorkers “carry this dogmatic identity throughout the day that is very serious and very disciplined, with an established pattern of behavior. And the idea is that when the night falls, or they’re caught in this moment where [they’re] not supposed to be seen, they have this totally different persona.” It is those moments of intimacy that Villafañe magnifies.

Working with canvas, murals, and sculpture, the artist hones in on the exuberance of a late night party to distort reality. Works like “Behind the Curtain” hint at life as one big performance dependent on an audience. If the performers are “behind the curtains” then the viewer is invited to witness their escape from monotony and rehearsed behavior. Like a scene from the roaring twenties, there is glamor in excess. Colorful fabrics and fishnets intertwine and androgynous bodies merge. Heavy make-up and flashy garments ornament their bodies. We witness the chaos of performers in between acts.

The bright palette of “Behind the Curtain” directly speaks to the symbiosis between Villafañe’s immediate context and painting. Seasonal changes influence the tonality of his work. His summer creations are lively and vibrant while fall brings neutral warm tones. Lately, he’s spent less time in large gatherings, so he’s gravitated to creating duets of people: “This summer a lot of my friends left town but when they started coming again, I started thinking, ‘I want to put this person and that person back again, back in the play.’”

Villafañe’s formal training as an architect is keenly present in his pictorial vocabulary, as the scenes he depicts are often framed by columns and archways. A building’s interior acts both as a physical space for respite but also as an extension of an alternative private sphere. Particularly during the pandemic, “The house became the total center of human life.” Within the privacy of an enclosed space, Villafañe says that we “escape reality or the chaos of the outside world.” In “Beneath The Suit,” a lively party takes place after business hours when irreverent behavior is on full display. In Villafañe’s words, “You don’t know if the banker is wearing drag or whose leg is whose.”

At the Armory Show, Villafañe debuted “Midnight Sculpture,” a voyeuristic diorama that invited audiences to look through a cross-shaped aperture. Visitors who peered in could view clusters of nude bodies dancing from various windows. Since the diorama had a peering hole on each plane, viewers could also see other curious eyes. In this way, viewers “became the performers as they all merged in the center.” This both implicates viewers in the act of viewing, while highlighting the fine line between innocent curiosity and invasive intrusion. In our conversation, Villafañe toys with the idea of a life-sized, immersive work that people can actually walk into — themselves becoming the piece’s vaudevillian players — to blur the lines between art and reality.

Still early in his career, Villafañe absorbs creative inspiration from across the board. He reads widely, everything from Renaissance art and fiction to performance theory. For an upcoming group exhibition at Diablo Rosso gallery in Panama, he is working on a canvas that places his riotous pleasure-seekers inside a dollhouse, where each room, including the bathroom, will feature an intimate gathering. The work in progress views the building as if cut in half, exposing what’s inside. That in itself has opened a plethora of new ideas. Looking to the future, Villafañe can see himself translating this creative ecosystem into costume and theater next. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of doing set design and costume design.”

Though Villafañe’s work at first glance may seem like that of another era, it is rooted in the duality of human behavior today. “You have folks that just live here and follow quotidian routines, or are playing dominoes on the street, or they’re always hanging out with their dog in the corner of the supermarket smoking a cigarette.” Above all, his work is nourished by people. “Maybe one day when I’m older, I’ll find beauty in solitude, but for now, I think I like to be surrounded by people that I can talk to.” Those same city-dwellers must cut loose at some point, and Villafañe articulates the raw moment of their release.

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is soft-spoken, yet her words carve a space to remember. Her debut novel, set in Colombia against the backdrop of political instability and Pablo Escobar’s violent reign, “Fruit of the Drunken Tree,” was a semi-autobiographical novel. It vividly summons the turmoil of Colombia in the nineties by juxtaposing private familial moments with national history. For her highly anticipated and critically acclaimed second book, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” Contreras continues to tenderly illuminate personal and overshadowed voices.

In this memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras reclaims curanderismo from the shadows of history. Often relegated to magical realism, folklore and superstition, Rojas Contreras’ lyrical personal account says otherwise. To write about her family’s cultural lineage is to reject colonial judgment against Indigenous ways of knowing. Curanderismo is a gift, a medicine against perpetual state violence, an inheritance that exists at the edge of perception.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds” is a telling of the author’s most valuable inheritance: “the secrets.” Growing up in Colombia, her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero with the ability to conjure spirits and treat ailments. Similarly, her mother could foresee the future and be in two places at the same time. In her twenties, Rojas Contreras inherits her family’s gifts after recovering from a head injury that left her with amnesia. The book interweaves the author’s relearning of her family’s history with a journey to Colombia after shared dreams among the women in her family urge them to disinter her grandfather’s remains.

LATINA spoke to the Pulitzer-nominated author on inscribing the incomprehensible, reclaiming knowledge once lost, and the power of the written word to bring people together.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Your first book was fiction and your second book, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” is nonfiction. What went behind that decision?

I always knew that I wanted to write “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”. What happened is that I kept getting the comment that what I was writing was fiction, and that made me angry. I would write about moments like my aunts [and uncles] seeing my grandfather move clouds and I would turn that [piece] into a [writing] workshop and people would say, “Okay, but you know that didn’t really happen. This is kind of fiction.” I wanted to make space and come up with a way that I could claim territory for these kinds of stories in nonfiction. A lot of South American communities have stories like this. A lot of Indigenous communities have stories like this. So it came from a place of, “I’m going to figure out how to [write this] and find my language to do it.”

There is so much power in claiming that nonfiction space because often these stories are labeled as magical realism.

That’s the other narrative injustice that I saw. Often these ways of telling stories are Native to the continent. Then, when people hear magical realism or recognize some magical realism in this book, there’s this mistake of thinking a few writers [of the Latin American boom] came up with this way of telling. One of the things that I’ve said is [my writing] is real magical realism. I wanted to write something that explained the provenance of [magical realism] – where it comes from — and make sure to [show that] it is actually a very old way of telling and relating.

How would you describe “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”?

I think that it’s about telling stories that are at the margin of perception. For example, when my aunts and uncles witnessed my grandfather move clouds, that was at the edge of perception. It’s a place of reality where we don’t know what happened. We know what we saw and we know what we experienced but it’s very hard to put into language what actually took place. Even with the photos that I took for the book, I was trying to document what I think the margins of perception are. And so, any time that somebody would say, “I saw a ghost appear here,” I would photograph it. It was my way to put language [and imagery] to something that’s very hard to pin down.

What does reclaiming curanderismo mean to you?

I think that within South America, and the Latino community as a whole, there’s a lot of healing that needs to happen around anything that is Indigenously rooted because there’s just such a fear of [that kind of “mysticism”]. Some of the things that we say today about skin color, history, or spiritual practices are what European people would have said at their arrival. [Europeans would have said that curanderismo is witchcraft,] a practice that came from people who were mixed, whether it was African or Indigenous or Spanish. To reclaim curanderismo is also to tell this history, to point out when it’s repeated, and ask why things are the way they are. I think that we’re in the place to do that work now. A different generation, even my mother’s, would have been so afraid to admit that my grandfather was a curandero or that my mother was a curandera for fear of the social stigma. Now, we get to have these conversations and we get to ask questions.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (@i__rojascontreras)

Your family’s story is set against a backdrop of continual state violence. What might the relationship between violence, surviving and curanderismo speak to?

When you have such a high scale of national tragedy, loss, and grief, and when people are going through a lot of traumatic events that are very hard to heal from, you need stronger medicine. It’s a different way of dealing with illness, and letting all of your history into the room. It’s a different way of relating.

This reminds me of the chapter in your book where you are holding card readings for your grade school peers and all the heavy questions they would bring to you.

If you were doing a regular card reading it might be “Who likes me? Does this person like me back? Am I going to have this job that I want?” Very practical questions. The questions that I got were, “My father is kidnapped. Will he come back?” or “Are we going to lose our house? Where am I going to be living next year?” Everyone has been touched by the conflict in a very deep and wounding way. So there’s a way in which the nation carries joy and gravitates to curanderismo. All of these practices have to do with that question of, “How do we carry such a heavy thing? How do we support each other? How do we make it through the day?”

I could relate to so many stories in your book. There’s one chapter on gold hunting that struck me as eerily similar to my own family’s stories that took place in Michoacán, Mexico. How often do you get these sorts of reactions from your readers?

I actually get them a lot. It reinforces this idea that we share so much culturally. I imagine part of it is that the migration in the continent was very loose; there was a lot of exchange. The ways that we were colonized throughout the continent are very similar. Even with a Filipino writer, I mentioned that Colombians, when we’re pointing to something, we point with our mouths, and she said, “Filipino people do that too.” And then I heard from a Native American writer that Native American people do that as well. It’s so wonderful to have a place where I’m telling my story and people get to say, “Oh, that’s also like us.” We make connections that I don’t think we would otherwise.

What are you currently reading and what are you working on next?

I’m reading a lot of George Saunders right now because I’m doing an event with him in October. I’m working on something in fiction. It’s been very messy, I just started. It’s going to be a story about either a community of female curanderas or a family of curanderas. I’m still not sure. With all my work, I seem to be very fascinated with the way that women survive hardship and conflict and war, and how women teach young girls to do that. It seems like I’m still gravitating to that theme with this next work. But, you know, anything can change.

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.

The Latin American “art turn” is a recent phenomenon. Just a few decades ago, art from the Global South was largely missing from canonical Euro-American histories. Yet artistic production never ceased. Art that was once relegated to national and regional contexts, is slowly rising among mainstream art circles. Phaidon’s latest publication Latin American Artists From 1785 to Now reminds us of the vast aesthetic, political and intellectual contributions of artists from the region.

Covering twenty countries and three hundred and eight modern and contemporary artists, Latin American Artists From 1785 to Now features groundbreaking artists born and/or based in Latin America. From artist and public intellectual Cuco Fusco’s video art to Peru’s father of documentary photographer Martín Chambi, the line up is ambitious and vast. It includes historic and today’s rising artists, working across a range of mediums. In order to cover such a wide breadth, Phaidon editors worked in close collaboration with a global panel of advisors, including art historians, critics, curators, writers, and collectors.

Rather than following a date based chronology of art – a practice that has been long critiqued for its exclusionary effects – the book organizes artists in alphabetical order. Each artist is represented by one key artwork and a specially commissioned text, written by one of nearly fifty contributors, which provides background information about the artist and discusses the illustrated work. One page per artist means lesser known names receive the same treatment as entries for established artists like Diego Rivera, Tarsila Do Amaral and Fernando Botero. The non chronological format is a nod to a growing movement considering art history horizontally beyond national and regional boundaries. The brevity of each entry makes readership approachable and prioritizes the visual. There is no right way to approach the book, one could begin alphabetically or let the eyes roam until an artwork or name invites them in.

Among its strengths, the book introduces readers to lesser known names that Raphael Fonseca – curator and writer of the publication’s introductory essay – describes as “B-Sides” in cultural narratives. According to Fonseca, these are “artists that generally didn’t have the same commercial or institutional success, and artists from countries that generally are eclipsed by bigger and more powerful countries in Latin America.” One example of the former is Brazilian artist Sonia Andradre, a pioneer of video and mail art who is often omitted from mainstream Latin American art narratives but is included in the publication. As for countries largely overshadowed, Latin American Artists From 1785 to Now includes artists from Panama, Bolivia and other Central American states. These include the performance work of Regina José Galindo that contends with the genocide of the Ixil people in Guatemala, and the sculptural works of Beatriz Cortez. It’s an exciting intervention because as Fonseca elaborates, “If you look at the whole list, I would say perhaps half of the artists still don’t have books published about them.” Their inclusion is a necessary rectification of historic power imbalances.

The alphabetical organization brings forth novel and unexpected juxtapositions. Rarely are the artists placed side-by-side working out of the same country, medium or time-span. The black and white photography of Panamanian artist Sandra Eleta from 1978-80 is paired with a 1998 installation by conceptual artist Leandro Erlich from Argentina. With a long-standing commitment to highlighting neglected narratives, Eleta in “Edita (la del plumero),” a domestic worker in uniform holds a feather duster across her chest, and with regal pose, effectively turns her employer’s gilded chair into her throne. Meanwhile, in Erlich’s work, “La Pileta,” the installation confronts viewers with the sight of a full-size swimming pool in a gallery. Ultimately, these artist pairings counter the fallacy of a singular Latin American aesthetic.

Raphael Fonseca reminds us that any attempt to tell a comprehensive history of Latin America will fall short. In his introductory essay he notes that “The only certainty when circumscribing the identity of any place is that something will always be missing.” It is because the Latin America identity is wide, amorphous and porous that multiple definitions of Latinidad exist. In light of various definitions of Latin America, the artistic contributions from Francophone Caribbean countries are absent, such as Haiti’s reverberating influence in the Caribbean and global avant-garde movements.

Additionally, while the book aims to cover four centuries, it has a strong focus on artists working from the 1920s onward. It does include canonical figures of early republics, such as Afro-Peruvian artists José Gil de Castro and Francisco Oller y Cestero of Puerto Rico, both working in the first half of the 19th century; however, these entries are few and far between. It’s a two-sided coin. With an emphasis on the twentieth century, a web of relations, conversations and tensions between artists begin to unfold. So while the early modern period is sparse, the concentrated attention to the contemporary era allows for a deeper reflection into art of the now and nurtures contemporary artists’ place in history.

Latin American Artists From 1785 to Now is an ambitious project. With a stellar group of advisors, readers will come away with a keener understanding of Latin American artistic production. However, the project of tracing and expanding the narrative is ongoing and never complete. Thus the publication is as an aperture into Latin American art and the possibilities for telling more inclusive histories.

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.

Samantha Saavedra chain stitches with a hundred-year-old Singer sewing machine. What began as a tailoring stint at Levi’s led to running a business out of her home. Then, in 2022, Saveedra opened Mira Flores, a retail and tailor shop specializing in chain stitch embroidery and denim repair. For the artist, embroidery is like tattooing. The needle slowly marks textiles as Saavedra hand cranks and directs the machine where to draw. With every customization, she blends the visual traditions of chain stitch embroidery and old school tattooing, while taking inspiration from her home-city, Lima, Peru.

We caught up with the Oakland-based artist to discuss the debut of her workwear line, and her recent brick-and-mortar expansion.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Samantha, I am the head tailor and owner of Mira Flores. My new workwear line has tags that say ‘Made in Peru, designed in Oakland.’ I feel like if I had a tag, it would say ‘Made in Peru and designed in San Francisco/Oakland.’ I was born in Arizona and moved with my mom to Lima, Peru when I was 3. I grew up there until I was 20. I wanted to get out of Lima so badly. I was a rebellious teenager and didn’t want to do what my mom told me. I came [to the Bay Area] not knowing much. I just knew that Full House was filmed here and that was pretty much it. I studied at the Art Institute of San Francisco, and it shaped me into the creative that I am today. In the early 2010’s, kids my age were going to art school, running around the Mission District, going to art shows, and hanging out at the Phone Booth.

How did you get your start in chain stitch embroidery?

I was working at a restaurant and my coworker got a job at Levi’s as a tailor. She comes to work one day and she [shows us what she did at Levi’s.] And I saw that it was chain stitch. I remember thinking, ‘That is so cool. I want to do that.’ It sparked my creative light bulb. I ended up getting a job at Levi’s but they wouldn’t let me touch the embroidery machine for the first eight months. I had to pay my dues and do all the hems and tapers, and repair all the nasty crotches from denim nerds that never wash [their jeans]. As soon as I got my hands on that embroidery machine, my friend Gillian, who got me the gig, and I began making crazy pieces. I was already really into tattooing, and already a drawer. I remember we were asking headquarters, ‘Can we do a display for Christmas?’ We would do these crazy pieces on these jackets, and they asked us, ‘Wait, you can do things like that with a machine?’

There seem to be some parallels with tattooing and chain stitching.

Chain stitching is like tattooing on clothes. The first time I heard that it was from a tattoo friend who saw me do embroidery. You’re freehanding, manually guiding the machine where to go. I have a lot of traditional American style tattoos too. So, when I was first learning, I would practice with traditional roses, you know, imagery that is simple and solid, with minimal shading.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by MiraFlores (@shopmiraflores)

How would you describe your aesthetic now?

I love lettering and roses, so I reference vintage signs and tattoo culture a lot. I also love drawing naked women. It’s been my own discovery of liberation. People were, like, ‘Free the nipple.’ I was like, ‘Let’s draw naked women.’ Even when I find a reference and they‘re fully-clothed, I’m always, ‘Yeah, no, naked.’

Where do you find inspiration these days?

Lately, I’ve been looking more into my roots. I’ve lived in [the U.S.] for 13 years, and I discovered all this art that’s distinctly American. But since COVID, I began missing my family and I wanted to reconnect. In Peru there is so much culture that I am only now starting to appreciate. Now, when I go back home, I realize, ‘Oh, all the bus signs are hand painted. All the fisherman boats are hand painted. That’s so cool!’ My partner and I got a sign painted by a guy that does all the fisherman boats in this tiny little town outside of Lima. I grew up in Peru, and I felt some resentment towards it. A lot of love too, but a lot of resentment. I never fit in. But I’m an adult now. I know who I am. Let’s look at Peru and think, how can we get inspired and love this place again?

How has this newfound appreciation for Peru influenced your work?

My store is actually named after the neighborhood that I grew up in Lima. Mira Flores is an homage to who I am and who I’ve been running away from. In the last few years, I started looking back and really being proud and loving where I came from. So I think people are going to start seeing a change in my art.

Tell me about your line of clothing that you’re producing in Peru.

Once we had the store, I had all these ideas of what I wanted to design. I was sourcing other brands, workwear shirts.. I thought, ‘Why don’t we create our own?’ My dream has always been to do workwear for femme bodies. I started working with a really good friend that works in Gamarra, the fashion garment industry of Lima. It was important for me to find factories that were not sweatshops, so. I went to see the factories, and they’re in great condition and treat their employees well.

You are re-opening your store in a new, larger location. What prompted the move?

The first space gave us what we needed for the first year. It was amazing, but it [was] too small. I’m a Pisces, so I dream big. I imagine all the amazing things we can do. People [would] be waiting for an hour to try clothes on on a busy day. I also wanted to bring in more vendors because not only do we customize garments that come into the shop, we also create a space for other artists and makers to sell their own items. I always wanted a space where artists could connect with their customers and with other artists. Us artists, we sometimes don’t value our craft or it’s scary to ask for what we want and need. So I want a store where artists can value their work and people can meet those artists. The bigger space is to be able to do social events and have more fitting rooms.

How do you balance your creativity with running a business?

I am a workaholic. I’m not gonna lie. Some of my friends have my [phone] location, and they’re like, ‘Girl, it’s three in the morning, you’re still at the store?’ or ‘You’re in the studio?’ I just love what I’m doing but I am trying to ask for more help. I can’t do it all myself, and you kind of have to spend money to make money. That’s been literally what I’ve had to do in the last six months. I’ve been just like, ‘It’s okay. Like we can totally pay this person and ask for help and it’s going to give me more time to think creatively.’

What advice would you give someone thinking about starting a business or getting started on a creative endeavor?

Do not listen to that tiny little voice that is trying to bring you down. You don’t need a business plan. I didn’t have one. And always reach out for help. Reach out to your community because those are the people that are going to be your biggest supporters. 80% of the people that I know now came from my early years in San Francisco and they have been my biggest supporters throwing my name out there to other people. I started a crowdfunding campaign for my store through Kiva, and my mom came in and sent an email to [practically every] person that has ever met me. [Many responded], ‘I haven’t seen you since you were a baby, but your mom told me to support you.’

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.

Welcome to LATINA’s Art Digest, a periodical collection of new events, expos, and happenings in the art world. From rising Latinx artists, curators, and exhibitions, we highlight the must-see art events happening at the moment.

At the end of each summer, aside from New York Fashion Week, New York City buzzes to the tune of world-famous art fairs and exciting new exhibitions. At Abrons Arts Center, curator Mellány Sánchez pays homage to mid 20th century fashion workers, and identifies a through line between their work and today’s leading fashion designers. Meanwhile at Kurimanzutto, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane showcases campy garments and “wearable sculptures” that question the fashion industry’s practices and gender binaries. Other artists and exhibitions contend with memory, such as Muriel Hasbun’s haunting experimental photography and Martín La Roche’s participatory audience exercises.

“The Endless Coup”

On view at New Art Dealers Alliance from September 5, 2023 to September 30, 2023.

“The Endless Coup” is a group show featuring 21 artists of Chilean background taking place at the New Art Dealers Alliance. The exhibition showcases works that contend with the impact of the Chilean coup d’état on September 11, 1973 and Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Floria González: “Mixtape”

On view at JO-HS New York Gallery from September 5, 2023 to October 5, 2023.

For her solo presentation, “MIXTAPE,” the Mexico-city based artist Floria Gonzalez translates music into visual form. Gonzales looks back at the time in her life when she would wait hours for the radio DJ to play her favorite song to record it on tape. Her ensuing work reads like a playlist: Home with You, FKA Twigs; Sound and Vision, David Bowie. Each of the artist’s song-inspired paintings are a nostalgic entry into a parallel universe. Power ballads and dreamy electronic songs turn to eerie dreamscapes. In Thanks for the Dance, Leonard Cohen, loose, thick brushstrokes depict a house caving in amid a gray and somber landscape. It captures the melancholy of Cohen’s raspy voice, and larger contemplation of the fluid nature of love and lust. The exhibition is a vulnerable exploration of music enmeshed in memories.

“Objects of Permanence”

On view at Abrons Art Center from September 6, 2023 to September 14, 2023.

During New York Fashion Week, “Objects of Permanence” amplifies the foundational contributions of Puerto Rican women and other Latina/Caribbean communities of the mid 20th century in New York’s fashion industry. This multimedia exhibition bridges their legacy with today’s leading fashion designers, featuring objects by the likes of Tremaine Emory and Willy Chavarria. This is a tribute to the hands that built and dressed New York City.

The Armory Show

On view at the Javits Center from September 8, 2023 to September 10, 2023.

The Armory Show — one of the most highly anticipated art fairs — returns to New York City. This year’s roster brings galleries from across the country, including the Latin American cities São Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota, and San Juan. We are particularly excited to see Embajada’s presentation of Jean Pierre Villafañe’s carnivalesque paintings and Catherine Clark Gallery’s booth featuring Arleene Correa Valencia’s faceless depictions of migration on textiles.

Mildred Beltré: “Allow Me to Gather Myself”

On view at The Latinx Project from September 8, 2023 to December 7, 2023.

“Allow Me to Gather Myself” features work by The Latinx Project Artist-in-Residence Mildred Beltré. In this solo exhibition, Beltré explores “the power and limits of language.” The artist has a wide ranging practice working across abstraction, textiles, and even creating her own walnut-based ink to develop a “counter archive” of Afro-diasporic ways of knowing. The public is invited to RSVP for the opening reception.

Dolores Furtado: “Vestigio”

On view PROXYCO Gallery opening on September 8, 2023.

Dolores Furtado experiments with glass and paper pulp sculptures in her solo show, “Vestigio.” She is interested in collapsing time and space in her work. Her glass sculptures are simultaneously pristine and timeworn, futuristic and ancient. Furtado’s sculptures, characterized by their rough exterior and amorphous shaping, defy expectations of what glass objects can be.

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane: “New Lexicons for Embodiment”

On view at Kurimanzutto New York from September 14, 2023 to October 21, 2023

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane works at the intersection of fashion and art. In “New Lexicons for Embodiment,” the fashion designer and artist showcases ready-to-wear garments from her eponymous label, and new “wearable sculptures,” through which Kane can articulate social issues within the fashion industry.

Paulo Monteiro: “Undefined Inclusions”

On view at Pace Gallery from September 15, 2023 to October 28, 2023

In “Undefined Inclusions,” Paulo Monteiro explores the limits of shapes in 50 separate artworks. His vivid oil paintings on linen and sculptural works are all about form and perception. As seen in his piece Untitled/ Sem título, the oval motif repeats across sculptures and paintings as a passageway for new colors, tones and shapes. See this exhibition for a mesmerizing journey into abstraction and bright colorways.

Pepón Osorio: “My Beating Heart / Mi corazón latiente”

On view at the New Museum through September 17, 2023.

For over thirty years, Pepón Osorio has upended traditional notions of art-making via his richly ornate installations. “My Beating Heart / Mi corazón latiente” is Osorio’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. It includes five large-scale installations inspired by everyday environments, from home interiors to barbershops and classrooms. These include Badge of Honor (1995), a recreation of a teenage boy’s room adjacent to a cell block. The artwork slowly reveals itself to be an intimate conversation between a teenager and his imprisoned father. Vignettes of everyday life overpower the museum walls and ultimately question how we might take better care of one another.

Martín La Roche: “Yo también me acuerdo”

On view at Miriam Gallery from September 21, 2023 to November 18, 2023.

“Yo tambien me acuerdo (I do remember)” is a site-specific participatory installation that encourages visitors to touch the art, and most importantly, to remember and forge new narratives. Via a series of prompts embedded in the exhibition, artist Martín La Roche activates the gallery into a space for collective healing and renaming. The artist is scheduled to lead a series of creative, tactile, and group exercises throughout the run of the exhibition.

Muriel Hasbun: “Tracing Terruño”

On view at the International Center for Photography from September 29, 2023 to January 8, 2024.

Multidisciplinary artist and educator Muriel Hasbun superimposes X-ray scans, expired film, and archival family documents to foreground overlapping ideas of home, geography and borders. “Tracing Terruño” illustrates the way migration, war and genocide are forever imprinted on terruño (land). Hasbun, a descendant of Salvadoran and Palestinian Christians on her paternal side, and Polish and French Jews on her maternal side, grounds the exhibition in the personal. Her experience migrating from El Salvador during the civil war in 1979, and her mixed heritage pulsate across her work. In “Tracing Terruño,” Muriel Hasbun tells the story of one family’s experience with dislocation via nearly 80 experimental works. Through photography, video and installation, the artist embarks on a quest of remembering.

Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: “Q’iwanakaxa/Q’iwsanakaxa Utjxiwa” (Cacique apoderado Francisco Tancara & Rosa Quiñones confronted by the subprefecto, chief of police, corregidor, archbishop, Reid Shepard, & Adventist missionaries)

On view at MOMA PS1 until October 2, 2023.

Siblings Chuquimamani-Condori (Elysia Crampton Chuquimia) and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton honor their great-great-grandparents who worked towards asserting the Aymara people’s land and religious rights in Bolivia. In collaboration with family, the siblings resume their ancestors’ legacy by bringing Indigenous Aymara cosmologies to MOMA PS1. The immersive exhibition consists of a mural accompanied by sound and music.

Manuel Aja Espil: “Worlds of Exile”

On view at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary through October 14, 2023.

Manuel Aja Espil proposes a new visual vocabulary for dystopian fables. Aja Espil draws from sci-fi, cartoons and Charles Dickens to create imaginary universes full of sarcasm and spectacle. “Worlds of Exile,” Aja Espil’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., features new paintings that fuse European romantic landscapes with fantastical subjects. His gaze on society and nature may just imagine a world without the direct presence of human beings.

Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): “Nothing New”

On view at the New Museum from October 12, 2023 to January 14, 2024

In “Nothing New,” artist Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, better known as Puppies Puppies, will blend art and life together as she transforms the New Museum’s lobby into a stage for her daily activities. Mediated through a fogged glass, viewers will have a cloudy view of the artist as she re-contextualizes quotidian life into a performance. In sensationalizing her daily existence, Kuriki-Olivo embraces the nuanced layers of her own identity, rejecting tokenization and reductive narratives of racial and trans identities.

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.

Banana trees and calling cards are some of the motifs of Paola De La Calle’s largest body of work to date, spanning across ceramics, textiles, installation, and sound, In This House We Are All Buried Alive, runs through August 27th at San Francisco’s SOMArts.

In her debut solo exhibition, De La Calle conjures memories of her childhood, family migration, and Colombia. For the multimedia visual artist, everyday objects are imbued with stories, memories, and history. In De La Calle’s words, “Objects can be sort of like portals through space and time.” She transforms quotidian imagery and instills new meaning to fill in the gaps of historical amnesia, or the parts of the past we tend to forget. In doing so, she quietly bridges the distance between history and personal memory.

De La Calle grew up in the greater Boston Area before relocating to San Francisco in 2017. Since then she’s completed various residencies including the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program and the KALA Art Institute Print Fellowship. While her family migrated to the States from Colombia in the eighties, the connections across time and diaspora reverberate through De La Calle’s practice today. “I spent a lot of my childhood both living and traveling back to Colombia, even though I was born [in the United States]. I consider [that] to be a really big privilege — to be able to have this conversation across borders, across countries.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by 🪞 Paola de la Calle 🪞 (@paoladelacalle)

She’s used the privilege of citizenship to investigate notions of home, borders and identity in her artmaking. In 2021, she was the lead artist for Caravan for the Children, a campaign demanding the “Release, Reunification and Healing of migrant children” in ICE custody. The works she made then were focused on extending herself outward and collaborating with other artists and organizations, a compassionate reach toward those whose lives continue to be in jeopardy.

In In This House We Are All Buried Alive, De La Calle looks inward. She investigates how the social-political histories of the United States and Colombia shape family narratives, influence identity, and transform cultural memory. She does so by centering her own diasporic experience. “I think this work is deeply personal in a way that my work hasn’t been before. Before, I was talking about events: historical moments or social movements. Now I’m really thinking about the ways that these historical moments, things that we learn about, affect the personal,” De La Calle explains.

The result is a generous exhibition where De La Calle shares sacred and private vignettes of migration in order to humanize history. Held at SOMArts in San Francisco, the exhibition features an array of recent collage, textile and sculptural works that interweave personal and historical archives. One of her most striking works is the centerpiece Hanging Archive, a series of printed chiffon ribbons ranging from 15 to 42 feet in length which are hung from the rafters of the main gallery. In it, De La Calle juxtaposes printed WhatsApp messages and screenshots from Google Map searches with embroidered first-person accounts of Spanish colonization and the War on Drugs. While they may not seem like it at first, in putting this imagery alongside “official” archives De La Calle reminds us how these mobile apps can serve as repositories for memories, just like institutional archives.

Like Hanging Archive, many of De La Calle’s works reference the role that modes of communication have in creating memories across borders and time. To this effect, calling cards are referenced throughout the exhibition. In For Our Words to Travel When We Couldn’t (Magic Carpet) a hanging textile takes the form of an Orbitel card – a popular Colombian prepaid calling card used in the pre-WhatsApp era. Whereas Orbitel cards are pocket size and feature a generic slew of promotional photos like families hugging and colonial churches, De La Calle’s calling card is 4 feet tall and features a patchwork of her own photography. In this piece, she compiles images of a banana field, clay roof tiles, and home video stills featuring a child (her sister) on the phone and another blowing birthday candles. The card has a shiny fringe at the bottom, referencing the work’s title; though separated by distance and borders, the card miraculously acts as a magic carpet that allows loved ones to share tender moments by proxy.

For De La Calle, among the most exciting elements in her latest work is incorporating natural materials. “Material is really important for me, [as is] making sure that the material goes hand in hand with the message,” she shared. On that note, the artist worked with coffee-based ink to create watercolor recreations of old family photographs. It’s a natural connection to her roots for De La Calle, as coffee is both a reminder of home and a historically charged relic. As a motif in De La Calle’s work, it alludes to intimate familial moments over warm coffee, when stories are passed down and jokes are shared, as seen in Sobremesa (o La Silla del Abuelo en Barrio San José) [Abuelo’s Chair in Barrio San José]. In both subject and material, De La Calle invites us to understand how coffee can inspire a collective remembrance.

In other artworks, coffee represents Colombia’s largest commodity. In this context, coffee refers to the extractive relationship between the USA and Colombia and colonialism at large. De La Calle addresses this head-on in Religion, Cafe y Banano (Roban y Regalan Bala) [Religion Coffee, Bananas, (They Rob Us and Gift Us Bullets)], a collage where coca leaves turn into bullets as they pour down. Below them, staples of Colombian life lay waiting to be struck – a bunch of Chiquita bananas, an espresso cup, and a palm Sunday cross. The artwork, De La Calle explained, is simultaneously an “investigation on the War on Drugs and its impact on migration, the displacement of campesinos, and increased violence in Colombia.”

Though Paola De La Calle’s work is deeply personal and the point of reference for migration is Colombia, she invites viewers to find their own connections regardless of where they consider home to be. “Anytime someone can point to something physical that I collected and are able to attach their own memories to it, that’s [when I think], ‘yes, it’s doing what I wanted it to do,” notes the artist.

There are countless connections to be made in In This House We Are All Buried Alive. De La Calle translates history into enfleshed experiences, showing us how everyday objects can provoke melancholy, joy, and longing for a homeland far away. There are infinite bridges to memory, although she knows that memory is not synonymous with truth: “The way that we remember things might not be the way that they were” she admits.

De La Calle’s work, a masterful blending of the personal with the global, ignites a collective memory which inspires us to pick up the leftover pieces of our own histories in order to shape and tell our stories.

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.

This summer in the Southern California art scene we see a focus on both nurturing homegrown talent and contextualizing international artists’ work within the zeitgeist. Across museums and galleries, there is an emphasis on revisiting overlooked or flattened narratives in favor of plural histories and perspectives. Caps embellished with shards of glass from a Ford-F150, larger-than-life piñatas in the shape of lowriders, and sculptures made from found objects – these are just some of the works on view this summer.

​​Hélio Melo & Alison Saar

On view at Sea View in Los Angeles, CA through August 12, 2023.

Hélio Melo and Alison Saar taps into the connections between the artists rather than their geographic and socio-political differences. The late self-taught Brazilian artist Hélio Melo grew up in the Amazon and worked as a rubber tapper. His drawings and paintings evoke animals and ancestral fables to illustrate the region’s violent social and ecological transformations under the Brazilian dictatorship. Meanwhile, Alison Saar’s sculptural work is known for incorporating female archetypes and mythologies to convey the intersection between Blackness and womanhood in America. In this pairing, Saar’s sculptural works of arresting scale center each of the two galleries, with Melo’s arboreal, plant-dyed paintings nearby. It is an intimate exhibition to contemplate the artists’ work as they combine myth and realism to confront — and perhaps transcend — violence and conflict.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding & Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido

On view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through August 13, 2023.

It is always a celebratory moment when trailblazing artists get their first career retrospective. Such is the case for conceptual multimedia artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz. Surveying four-decades of work, this exhibition features over 35 artworks across photography, installations, sculpture, and book art. As a whole, Muñoz’s body of work is an exploration into language slippages, assimilation, and cultural recovery. Her work does so via playful interactions between images and words. In her early Enlightenment series — a set of ten artist books included in the show—the artist plays with text, puns, and various double meanings that she experienced growing up along the Mexican border. Celia Álvarez Muñoz is an artist that generously lets meaning multiply and boundaries dissipate with tenderness, humor and ingenuity.

Afro-Atlantic Histories

On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through September 10, 2023.

Afro-Atlantic Histories charts the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies in the African diaspora. The exhibition features work produced in Africa, Europe, and the Americas from the 17th century onward in an effort to present a global perspective on the histories and stories of enslavement, resilience, and the struggle for liberation. Together these works exemplify a multiplicity of perspectives across time and geography, ranging from historical paintings by French painter, Eugène Delacroix, to contemporary works by Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. The exhibition was initially presented as Histórias Afro-Atlânticas at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Brazil, and prominently features the work of Brazilian artists, such as Paulo Nazareth, Rosana Paulino, and Sidney Amara working across photography, printmaking and watercolors, respectively. Its U.S. tour has finally reached the West Coast at LACMA for a limited time.

Ahorita! [Right Now!]

On view at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. through September 2nd.

Ahorita! —“[Right Now!]” — is a group exhibition curated by LA artist and curandera [healer] Ever Velasquez. It showcases the work of women and non-binary artists, calling attention to some of the most pressing issues facing their communities. In the first gallery is a 30-foot textile imprinted with the rust of a ladder, which Tanya Aguiñiga had used to climb over the US/Mexico border fence. Nearby is Veronica Gaona’s “migrant caps,” embellished with shattered Ford F-150 truck window glass. The show features forty-four artists working across a wide range of practices and with variable interpretations of art activism, touching on topics including forced migration, women’s reproductive rights, and social constructs of identity. While primarily featuring recent work by artists such as Shizu Saldamando and Guadalupe Rosales, Velasquez intersperses more historical works such as Graciela Iturbide’s East LA photographic series, and turn-of-the-century work by Alison Saar.

Carmen Argote: I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe

On view at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles through September 10.

Carmen Argote’s artistic process is characterized by her use of found objects and trash, which she often collects on her daily walks. Her latest show is a continuation of this approach, with figs, pillows, bananas, and urine reconstituted into meditative works of art. I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe is a journey toward a deeper understanding of her inner self and all the versions of a person that can exist simultaneously. More specifically, the show is an exploration of power, control, generational trauma, and patriarchy across generations. Her Mother series considers her “child” and “mother” self in various states of submission, desire and restlessness that await to be healed. The exhibition is a re-mothering and re-birth of sorts as Argote speaks to her inner child, “I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe.”

Xican–a.o.x. Body

On view at the Cheech Marin Center in Riverside, CA through January 7.

Xican–a.o.x. Body addresses the body as a tool through which to challenge stereotypical and marginalized constructions of Chicanx identities. Within the 125 artworks by nearly 70 artists, the brown body is illegible, transgressive and resistant to reductive rhetorics. It is an intergenerational constellation of artists from the 1960s to present. Covering some of the most influential Chicanx artists of our time, the exhibition and accompanying catalog will leave a lasting imprint on how we consider Xicanx art for years to come. For now, see James Luna’s photography next to Justin Favela’s lifesize Gypsy Rose Piñata (II).

---

Joanna García Cherán is an art historian, writer and cultural worker passionate about art of our time.