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Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles-based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years, she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture, and gender while creating community.

Aguiñiga is a 2022 Latinx Artist Fellow, a recipient of the 26th annual Heinz Award, a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC Grant Recipient, and 

a Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts and Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has been the subject of numerous articles in American Craft Magazine, has been featured in Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century, KCET’s Artbound, and PBS’s Craft in America Series. 

Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border. 

Her work is currently on view in This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery and in Hella Feminist at the Oakland Museum of California. Recent museum exhibitions include: LatinXAmerican at the DePaul Art Museum, Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and Craft and Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Her work is included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Decorative Arts collection and Contemporary Arts collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Cooper Hewitt, Hammer Museum, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Aguiñiga is also currently featured in the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. 

Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985) is a Central American artist based in Los Angeles, California. Amézquita was born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and migrated to the United States in 2003. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design and an Associate degree in Visual Communications from Los Angeles Valley College. She is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in the New Genres program at the University of California, Los Angeles (2022). 

Her practice has been influenced by her family history of diaspora and her experiences as a formerly undocumented immigrant. In her work Amézquita explores narratives of migration and how people navigate power structures. She often incorporates segments of her personal archives to intertwine historical and contemporary references. Combining performances, site specific activations, installations and uses organic materials such as masa, soil, salt, hydrated lime, and produce using a visual language that explores modes of adaptation, and integration in the aftermath of migration.

Growth and decay to inspire forms of non-verbal communications that speak of the cycles of life, transformations, and temporality. Amézquita is interested in how living organisms and other entities integrate and create other environments. These ecosystems underline coexistence among diverse beings, reminding us of the life cycle and the afterlife. 

AMBOS Ceramics provides trauma informed ceramics classes to LBGTQIA+ asylum seekers in Tijuana. AMBOS ceramics started during the pandemic, intended to serve as a temporary program to provide a therapeutic outlet for the residents of Jardin de Las Mariposas. The program has since expanded to two LGBTQIA+ center and rehabilitation shelters for migrants and refugees in Tijuana: Jardin de las Mariposas and Arcoiris. 

The AMBOS ceramics program began in-person instruction in January 2021. Weekly live instruction has been led by accomplished queer artist Juan Villavicencio, with the support of a therapist from Centro 32/Families Belong Together Mexico. Thanks to a small grant from the Future Crafts Fund, AMBOS obtained funding to provide a year of instruction and partnered with Tijuana’s Lustre Studio. The remaining program costs have been provided through crowdsourced mutual aid fundraising. AMBOS Ceramics at Jardin de las Mariposas and Arcoiris has been crucial to the mental health and wellbeing of migrants, many of whom fled their home countries threatened by gender-based violence and persecution.

The works on display at Long Beach City College were created by AMBOS ceramics students during the spring of 2022. 

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her work spans formats and durations, including sound performances at a military site in New Haven (Sounds for Liberation); long-term public art interventions at the largest jail in the country (96 Acres Project, Chicago); and appropriations of museum archives (Brown Brilliance Darkness Matter). She also creates audio-video works, such as a jail located in her childhood neighborhood (On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous). 

Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, Latinx Artist Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Maria’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. 

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles based artist who’s interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. His widely exhibited “Erased Lynchings” series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African Americans in California and helped to ground anti-immigration and collective acts of violence within the larger discussion of racial formation, policing, and racial justice movements. 

In 2017, Gonzales-Day received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and in 2019 was awarded the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College. Gonzales-Day is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. He was a Van Lier Fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. He also serves on the board of directors for L.A.C.E., and on the Advisory Board for the Archives of American Art Journal. 

Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from University of California Irvine, and MA from Hunter College in NYC. His work has been widely exhibited: LAXART, The Getty, The Skirball, LACMA, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, the Tamayo Museum, the Museum of the City in Mexico City, The Palais de Tokyo in Paris, The New Museum, The Kitchen, Jack Shaiman, and El Museo del Barrio in NYC, Generali Foundation in Vienna, and Thomas Dane Gallery in London. 

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (b. 1989, Los Angeles) is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand-painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image-making. 

Gonzalez’s paintings seemingly passive still-lifes excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Gonzalez’s works are not merely metaphors, but objects that uphold the visual as a form of knowledge and language.

Jeremiah Henderson is a young self-taught artist from Gary, Indiana. Growing up in the Bay Area Jeremiah’s art is inspired by his favorite music and different cultures he has been immersed in, and the hardships he has experienced. Homelessness and a harsh upbringing are just a small part of what fuels Jeremiah’s passion and drive for his art. Jeremiah currently is a tattoo apprentice at a local shop in Long Beach and attends Long Beach City College. Henderson is currently working to achieve his goals of becoming a tattoo artist and attending Otis College of Art and Design. 

Alberto Lule served a thirteen-year sentence in a California prison. About 4 years into his sentence, he began to look for ways that would take him out of the prison space on a mental level. He noticed that a lot of inmates would exercise in the yard, so he began doing that. What really took him out of the prison space was drawing. It was art that made the prison walls disappear, even if only for the hours he would work. This habit of simple pencil drawing led to art books, and then a passion for art in general. This passion led to other forms of knowledge such as philosophy, and eventually college correspondence courses. He realized he could overcome not only the prison he was physically in, but the mental prison he had placed himself in even before prison. He started looking inward, and for ways to escape, and in so doing he realized the trappings of the prison system were only one of the many institutions that exist to trap and exploit people in this country. He realized then that his entire life was composed of 3 identities that this system has designated for him: The child of illegal immigrants, the gang member, and the prisoner. Out of these three identities, he chose to create a new identity while incarcerated: the artist. 

Lule’s work focuses on mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex in the United States, particularly the California prison system. Using his own experiences, he aims to tie the prison industrial complex to other American political issues such as immigration, homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health, all of which, are connected to the millions of people being incarcerated and used in a new form of slavery. By focusing on how institutional systems operate he points out the similarities between all institutions, from higher education to correctional institutions. These similarities can be exposed and learned from, not only from a scientific point of view, but even more thoroughly through art. He is the co-chair of a student organization at UCLA called The Underground Scholars Initiative, a group of students composed of formerly incarcerated students as well as students that have been impacted directly by the California prison system. We aim to support and advocate for formerly incarcerated students as well as students who are currently incarcerated. By partnering with other groups, such as UCLA’s Prison Education Program, the Underground Scholars Initiative fights to dismantle the prison industrial complex and the school to prison pipeline. He believes his observations and analysis through an artistic lens are new strategies for dealing with harmful and impactful issues that can be developed. 

Jennesa I. Martinez is a visual artist, spoken poet, and art therapist in-training who has lived and worked in Chicago, IL her entire life. 

Creating subtly bold artist books Jennessas’ most recent work examines memorials, tools of archiving, preservation, social justice, and community healing. She completed her BFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in Painting, Print Media, and Creative Writing and she’s currently working towards her MA in Art Therapy and Counseling at SAIC. Her recent exhibitions include her thesis exhibition at SAIC and group showcases at the Zhou B Art Center located in Chicago, IL. 

Narsiso Martinez’s drawings and mixed media installations include multi-figure compositions set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez’s portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through use of found materials, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers. 

Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) came to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. He earned an A from Los Angeles City College, a BFA from California State University Long Beach, an MFA in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach, and was awarded the prestigious Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally. His work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA. 

noé olivas (b. 1987, San Diego, California—occupied Kumeyaay land) lives and works in South Central Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2019, and his BFA from the University of San Diego, California in 2013. His work has been exhibited at the Candlewood Festival, Borrego Springs, California (2022); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2022); The Front Arte Y Cultura Gallery, San Ysidro, California (2021); Napa Hall Gallery at the California State University Channel Islands, Camarillo (2020); Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles (2019); Residency Art Gallery, Inglewood (2019); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); La Jolla Historical Society, San Diego, California (2018 San Diego Art Institute, California (2017); The New Children’s Museum, San Diego, California (2017);); and the San Diego Museum of Art. (2017). 

As part of the 2018 Mexicali Biennial, his work was also included in the traveling exhibition Calafia: Manifesting the Terrestrial Paradise at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Art Museum at the California State University, San Bernardino (2018), and Armory Center of the Arts, Pasadena, California (2019-2020). olivas has also performed in Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles (2019); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2020), Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2018), and the NADA and Prizm Art Fair, Miami (2018) with collaborator Patrisse Cullors, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018). With Patrisse Cullors and Alexandre Ali Reza Dorriz, Olivas is co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, an art hub in South Central Los Angeles and Inglewood. 

Isidro Pérez García (aka ChiloTe) is a borderless artist from Santa Ana, CA and Atotonilco El Grande, Hidalgo, México. As an interdisciplinary artist, Isidro approaches his work from a personal perspective as a formerly undocumented immigrant and a “campesino urbano.” From this perspective, he approaches artmaking as a networked and layered process of “thinking with things” in a visual and material way, with an interest in how his art work and practice can contribute to anti-colonial histories and narratives. His work often questions how frameworks of power came to be, especially what concepts such as “modernity” and “tradition” mean in relation to indigeneity, capitalism, and migration. He earned his BFA in Studio Art from CalArts and his MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, where his thesis work was awarded the David Antin Prize from UCSD and the Graduating Artist Award from ICA San Diego. His art work is currently included as part of the 2022-2023 Mexicali Biennial. 

In addition to his individual practice, Isidro maintains a project-based collaboration with writer and cultural worker Adriana Sánchez Alexander, together as Workshop for Community Arts, where they focus on social practice. Their collaborative work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture. You can follow Isidro’s work on instagram at @chiloteeeee. 

Miko Revereza (b. 1988. Manila, Philippines) is an experimental filmmaker currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship with moving images. DROGA! (2014), DISINTEGRATION 93-96 (2017), No data plan (2018), Distancing (2019) and El Lado Quieto (2021) have widely screened at festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYFF Projections, IDFA and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real. His debut feature film, No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award and San Diego Asian Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Award, as well as being listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Revereza is listed as Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema, a 2019 Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, MFA graduate at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaking. 

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible; especially looking at the audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant and refugee youth. 

His work has been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia; as well as institutions like The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum, and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. He is represented by Jose de la Fuente in Spain, and Galleriapiu in Italy. Rojas is currently the Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell University. Rojas has been recipient of various awards and fellowships including the Mellon Foundation Grant, the MAKERS Grant, Chicago Artist Coalition (2018) and Full Merit-New Artist Society Scholarship, M.F.A. Performance SAIC (2015).