Exhibition Archive

Photography has long privileged iconic centers while overlooking what surrounds them. In Foto 818, Amarales, Iñiguez, Mejorado, and Novales, four lens-based artists with deep ties to the San Fernando Valley, render the region legible as a site of artistic production and cultural imagination. Foto 818 insists that the Valley's visual language is not peripheral to Los Angeles, but one of its centers.

Los Angeles Mission College’s AMC Gallery, Sylmar, CA.

In Entanglement, Antonio Perez works in platinum-palladium printing and cast concrete to consider how people remain bound across time and distance. Made after losing his father and brother within a single year, and shaped by an enduring admiration for his mother, the work draws on quantum entanglement and rasquachismo to render grief as connection rather than absence. Entanglement speaks to the bonds of one family while opening onto broader questions of home, inheritance, and how cultural ties endure.

Moreno Valley College Art Gallery. Moreno Valley, CA.

Amina Cruz prints the redlined landscapes of Los Angeles as cyanotypes on mirrors, so that anyone who looks is reflected into the geography. Drawing on Anzaldúa's la facultad, the work gathers a sacred trinity (la Tortillera, el Joto, y les Potaxie) who carry inherited dispossession in their queer bones. The dance floor becomes the terrain where that inheritance is sublimated into anger, sadness, love, and joy, and cultural memory is rewritten rather than abandoned.

California State University Los Angeles Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

Curated through an open call, FuturoGenerational brings together student artists from FotoSoCal’s participating colleges. Working in photography, installation, and expanded lens-based practice, they turn the gallery into a portal where landscapes, homelands, venues, and generations meet. FuturoGenerational addresses a ruptured world with curiosity and tenderness, affirming the part artists play in repairing it.

California State University Los Angeles Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

Brings together sixteen artists whose ancestral lineages — Ayuujk, Nahua, Maya-Ch'ol, Ñuu Savi, Otomí, Maya-Kaqchikel, P'urhépecha, Diidxazà, Maya-Tsotsil, Zapotec, Sarhua, among others — predate Spanish colonialism and remain central to their contemporary practice. This project reassembles the Spanish colonial geography as a field of sovereign solidarities rather than a map of conquest. Moving beyond a critical interrogation of nation and citizenship, the exhibition proposes scholarship that moves across borders, languages, and disciplines, refusing the extractive epistemologies colonialism left in place.

University of Virginia Ruffin Gallery. Charlottesville, VA.

Concrete Hope brings together emergent photographers and lens-based artists from SoCal, working across installation media as the material ground for photographic depiction. Concrete Hope aesthetic axis is a celebration of all things Brown (piñatas, abuelitas, tatuajes, virgencitas, mercados, metates, buganvilias, veladoras, ladrillos, familia) the vocabulary of a community united by culture. What emerges is an act of self-affirmation birth from within the lived experience of SoCal’s complex Latine community, rendered by the people who live it.

Santa Monica College Barrett Art Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Nurturing Masculinities is Juan Manuel Valenzuela's blueprint for the soft margins of inherited masculinity, an aesthetic study of what machismo hardens and what tenderness might loosen. Across Nurturing Masculinities, Valenzuela juxtaposes what he learned from his elders with the kind of care he intends to pass to his son, locating the work precisely where brownness and manliness converge. In doing so, Nurturing Masculinities treats masculinity not as a fixed set of attributes but as something inherited, examined, and deliberately revised across generations.

Santa Monica College Emeritus Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

The People's Beach takes its bearings from Aydinaneth Ortiz's mother's daily commute to Belmont Shore — the corner of Los Angeles County that remained accessible to her community when the beaches beside it did not. Ortiz photographs the whole of that geography: greenery and breakwater, seascape and suburban sprawl, the people who come to work and to play. The People's Beach holds memory and reality at once, collapsing the distance between Ortiz's childhood and today.

Pasadena City College Art Gallery. Pasadena, CA.

Pérez García sources his materials locally (maguey, tule, cochinilla), plants shared across a border that arrived after the methods he works in. Migratory Land Knowledges asks what an immigrant leaves behind on crossing, and what inherited knowledge is obscured when a person is absorbed into a new economy. Against passports, bureaucracy, and settler colonialism, Migratory Land Knowledges proposes land itself as the ground of connection.

California State University San Marcos Library Gallery. San Marcos, CA.

Chicanexus brings together two master printmakers, each with more than two decades in the medium, whose ancestries (New Mexican and Jewish, Yaqui Chicano) place them squarely inside the question Chicanx theory has asked since El Movimiento: who counts as enough. Across silkscreen, linocut, and block printing on Japanese washi, Chicanexus surveys the porous nature of enoughness, declining the qualifier while celebrating what sixty-four years of Chicanx printmaking made possible. In Chicanexus, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl share space with children and Yalitza Aparicio, amid flora and a plethora of Guadalupes, on the premise that artists pollinate culture and truth.

Los Angeles Mission College AMP Gallery, Sylmar, CA.

Queerteñx brings together José Villalobos and Salvador de la Torre in work bound to the México/United States border aesthetically, historically, geographically, and conceptually. Across Queerteñx, fajos piteados, charola belt buckles, glittered Tejanas, hand-embroidered confessions, and barbed wire assemble a provocation against machismo, heteropatriarchy, and cis-supremacy, nepantleando in diaspora, where queerness becomes a site of infinite possibility. Villalobos and de la Torre hold Queerteñx, Emorteño, Rancholo, Norteño, and Mexican rancho cultures as inseparable to speaks from the queer and trans experience of the undoc+ diaspora, for whom ancestral lineage remains a source of wisdom regardless of contemporary border formations.

Loyola Marymount University Laband Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

Pertenecer | Encarnar gathers ten artists at the University of Virginia around a premise that resists definition: there is no single way to be undocumented, and no definition that holds across the globe. Working from the framework that is the undoc+ spectrum (those who have lived or are living undocumented) and the undocumented diaspora, those shaped by undocumentedness without embodying it. Pertenecer | Encarnar treats undocumentedness as gradient rather than category. Across Pertenecer | Encarnar, the migrant appears as David Cuatlacuatl describes: perpetually unfinished, a work of art constantly in revision.

University of Virginia Ruffin Gallery, Charlottesville, VA.

Entre Nos brings together thirteen undoc+ artists to question forgotten origins and cultural amnesia, honoring transnational grief while holding room for undocujoy and the ancestral blessings that accompany each immigrant journey. Reaching beyond the contemporary geographical holdings of the United States, Entre Nos builds community among those whose ancestral lineages predate the modern nations of Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, México, the Philippines, South Korea, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

Visible Records Gallery, Charlottesville, VA.

Recordar | Anhelar gathers thirteen artists in the undoc+ spectrum whose works form a multiplicity of remembrances, together outlining the embodiment of undocumentedness as a mediation of hope. Across Recordar | Anhelar, recollections converge interdependently to speak of memory, family, community, migration, spirituality, indigeneity, care, and futurity from an undocumented axis.

Agnes Scott College Dalton Gallery, Decatour GA.

Desterrando Archivos unearths Arlene Mejorado's family archive as an act of care: a tender excavation of objects, anecdotes, and memories in her grandmother's abandoned home. Across Desterrando Archivos, photographs and installations reconstruct a place of belonging from obscured family memory and imagination alike, confronting erasure while moving between the impermanence of home and the persistence of place. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison's literary archeology alongside Amalia Mesa-Bains's domesticana, Desterrando Archivos hands the camera to the next generation, who become participants in the archive rather than its subjects.

Galería Tiró al Blanco, Guadalajara, Jalisco

Undocumentedness presents Francisco Donoso's reworking of the chain-link fence as a site of infinite healing rather than a boundary. Across Undocumentedness DACAmented Donoso reshapes the wire structure endlessly until its psychological monumentality collapses and color turns liminal, marking interconnected passage rather than separation. Where Anzaldúa's Nepantla transformed the self between two worlds Donoso holds the self faultless and metamorphoses the space instead, making room for undocumented bliss, pleasure, and beauty.

Spring Break Art Fair, Culver City, CA

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by Refik Anadol & Peggy Weil

Gala Porras Kim

By Rirkrit Tiravanija

by Kerry Tribe