group show 66
La Frontera: A New Latinx Lexicon
About the Artists

Mario Alcauter
Bio: Mario Alcauter is an artist whose art specializes in subcultures within the Latin community. He received his BFA in Photography from Brigham Young University. There he has been able to develop his style and voice which are usually heavily influenced by his Mexican culture, icons, and contemporary fashion. He tries to blend them in order to bring a voice to these subcultures that are sometimes overlooked.

Statement: In many Latin countries and communities, the word Machismo refers to the idea of manhood by being self-reliant, strong, and able to provide for and defend your family. With this series, I want to show Latino men expressing themselves as sensitive and exposed. This is a project that I feel very strongly about as I group up in a community where it was looked down upon to dress in a modish style.

Daniel Alvarez
Bio: Daniel Alvarez Ospina resides and works in Medellín, Colombia. Graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2017), his artistic interests are derived from a deep observation of the urban space that he transits and inhabits. He roams the streets around to translate the everyday into artistic formalizations through different mediums: draw, engraving, photography, and video; resources that refer to the multiple temporalities and spatialities that are juxtaposed in the city.

Statement: To be Latino is to be a mixture of races, traditions, and cultures. That same mix is ​​what I feel every time I go out to walk the streets of the city where I live, Medellín. The selection of photos I made aims to reflect that feeling and project the mixture of coincidences so that I exist in this space and time.

Catalina Aranguren
Bio: Catalina Aranguren is a Latinx woman immigrant artist, curator, community organizer, and social justice warrior based in Jersey City, NJ. She centers her work around the philosophy of personal perceptions and intends for her work to speak to the viewer about photography as an awareness of the subject. Catalina received her BFA from SAIC with a stint at Spéos in Paris. She is currently raising three bilingual, bicultural boys with her husband and their dog.

Statement: Someone once asked me how they should look at my work. After a minute or two, I responded "Look at it like you were looking at a yearbook. Get up and close, and you will recall memories of times gone by."  My work explores the relationship between perception and cognition, it captures an instant with the hope that the viewer will recognize it as a documentation of something they once experienced themselves.

Stephanie Bravo
Bio: Stephanie Bravo is a freelance photographer currently living and working in Miami, Florida. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography and Imaging from Ringling College of Art and Design. Her work consists of portraiture, experimental imaging, and personal bodies of work. Stephanie’s recent work explores themes of identity, home, and liminal spaces. 

Statement: While reading texts written about, or by, Latin-American women, I came across the term, “nepantla,” from the Aztec language, Nahuatl, which means “middle.” The term is theorized to represent the concept of “in-between-ness” that is experienced by people exposed to two worlds, or cultures. This inspired my print-based collages and writing as I explored the meanings of “home” as an identity, a physical and mental space through cutting, layering, mirroring, and repeating elements in my work.

Danie Cansino
Bio: Born in Los Angeles, Danie Cansino is an educator and resident artist at Mi Familia Tattoo Studio, where she specializes in color, and Chicanx style black and grey realism. In fall of 2019, Danie began her candidacy for Master of Fine Arts, attending the University of Southern California. Danie Cansino has aspirations to help and teach others through the means of higher education, and through the creation and design of her own artwork and tattoos.

Statement: My work explores the notion that clients, peers, and mentors all have stories to tell-- showing the impact a tattoo can have on lifestyle, family, education, and careers.  I want to share these stories; and shine light on lineage, tradition, and the hardships of this practice. Tattooing, very much like all the elements of my work, is a major part of the history of my Latinx culture, and hometown of Los Angeles.

Amarise Carreras
Bio: Amarise Carreras is a photo-based performance artist, utilizing photography for both documenting and observing while engaging in performative conversations. The results are images of quotidian moments and narratives that portal history, ancestry, altars, and still lifes that are alive. The performative aspect is referential directly to a gentle and deeply personal connection to Amarise’s bisabuela and the Boricua womxn. This has become a focal aspect of Amarise’s investigation into Santeria. Amarise has shown in galleries such as Candela Gallery, Photocarrefour Gallery, and will be screening photographs internationally with Isla Collectivo throughout 2019-2020.

Statement: In this body of work, Amarise Carreras shows a co-written performance. Which has been an ongoing collaboration between their bisabuela and the Boricua womxn that raised Amarise. They center their studies and sensibility on learning about Santeria, a West African religion that has synchronized with Catholicism. This collaboration is a means to understand the survival of their lineage as native to the island, Puerto Rico. This series of spiritually reverential images is a collection of works from the last three years. 

Maximiliano Cervantes
Bio: Born in the border city Harlingen, Texas, Maximiliano Cervantes makes work based on his childhood experience of labor. His ongoing project How-To: Build a Father and Son Relationship shows the sets he and his father move across that are in conversation with How-To manuals. Additionally, Cervantes is influenced by artist apart of the Mexican Muralist, the WPA Muralist, and commercial photographers. 

Statement: For 19 years of my life, my father and I constructed and repaired our current family home, our past ones, and other people's property. How-To: Build a Father and Son Relationship is our iteration of visual labor that is in conversation with the Mexican Muralist, the WPA murals, and commercial photographs. The materials such as blue tarp, house paint, and my mother's barber apron are symbolic of labor in the economic landscape of Harlingen, Texas.

Rafael Concepcion
Bio: Rafael Concepcion (b. 1993, Danbury, Connecticut) is a photographic artist based in Stafford Springs, Connecticut. He received his undergraduate degree at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Connecticut, where he was awarded a Graduate Assistantship and the Zachs Award. His work has been shown in solo and group shows across the northeastern United States.

Statement: These photographs are from a body of work titled Where Do I Know You From? and were made across Puerto Rico. I am a mixed-race Puerto Rican person. Here, I am using photography to educate myself about this facet of my heritage through turning my camera on the architecture, landscape, and people of the island. This project was started in late-2016 and is ongoing.

Luis Corzo
Bio: Luis Corzo (b. 1990, Guatemala City, Guatemala) is a Brooklyn based artist. He received his BFA in photography and contemporary creation at IDEP, Barcelona in 2012. Corzo works mainly with photography but constantly experiments with film and mixed media. His main focus is exploring the world of digital communication, human activity, and the space in which we inhabit. His work has been exhibited in New York, Hiroshima, Miami, Barcelona, Bilbao, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Nashville. 

Statement: PASACO, 1996 is an investigative photography project that revisits a month-long abduction that Luis Corzo and his father lived through in 1996 in Guatemala.  The project contains archival media, as well as new documentation of locations, people, and objects that took part in the act.  The main objective of this project is to initiate conversations surrounding the story; those of violence, corruption, capital punishment, and criminal rehabilitation.

Ryan Debolski
Bio: Ryan Debolski is a Mexican-American photographer based in Detroit. He received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2014. His first book, LIKE, is published by Gnomic Book and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2020. His work has been featured in The New York Times, American Suburb X, British Journal of Photography, Collector Daily, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Statement: These images are from my new book, LIKE. LIKE looks at the experiences of migrant workers in Oman; the men who build luxury hotels and highways and power stations, fueling the expansion of incredibly wealthy nations. I developed friendships with the men I met on the beaches adjacent to worksites. The book consists of photographs depicting scenes of play on the beach and landscapes throughout the country.  

Luis Manuel Diaz
Bio: Luis Manuel Diaz, born in Michoacán, Mexico, is a photographer based in New York. His work examines themes of immigration, citizenship, and care. Diaz holds a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design, and was recently awarded the EnFoco Photography Fellowship and the Magnum Foundation US Dispatches Grant. He has exhibited work at Aperture Foundation, Bronx Art Space, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery, Pelham Art Center, and Baxter St Camera Club among others.

Statement: My work investigates post-migration effects on the rural Mexican landscape and the American suburbs as observed through my immediate family. I collaborate with my family to uncover histories of misrepresentation, imbalance of power, and systemic erasure of migrants and their families. In the work, there’s an investigation of national and cultural identity in relationship to photographic visualization. The images themselves celebrate the multilayered complexities of who we are, what we’ve been through, and where we are headed. 

Ileana Doble Hernandez
Bio: Ileana Doble Hernandez is a Mexican visual activist working with photography, video, installation and new media. Through her postcard installation “Mommy, what is this?” more than 400 postcards have been mailed to U.S. elected officials, advocating for gun control. Her works have been published and exhibited in the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, and South Korea. Ileana lives in Baltimore, MD, with her husband, their son, their dog, and their cat.

Statement: Ten photographs can’t be enough to represent what to be Latina is like, but I can start by showing the place where I come from. My native land is full of surprises, contradictions, and situations that’ll probably be illegal in The States, like the “Quema del Pobre Viejo”, a New Year’s Eve tradition at my father’s hometown. Being Latina means being ready for whatever it comes and assert my own identity without reservations. 

Diego Espaillat
Bio: Diego Espaillat was born and raised in Washington Heights, New York City. He graduated with a  BFA in sculpture from Lyme Academy in 2017. He lives and works in New York.

Statement: During 2018 I saw more of the Dominican Republic than I ever expected. I traveled widely, from Haitian border at Jimani, to the North-Western corner of Montecristi. These images document my travels by car, foot, motorbike, and boat. They allow us to visit the diverse terrain, structures, and peoples encountered along the way.

Tanya Flores Hodgson
Bio: Tanya Flores Hodgson is an artist based in Los Angeles. She was born in Masaya Nicaragua and immigrated to the United States at a young age. She holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Art Photography and a minor in Latin American Studies from California State University Long Beach. Her work focuses on Central American identity, immigration, feminism, social movements, and the impact of U.S. imperialism/colonialism on Latin American politics, specifically Nicaragua, through a feminist decolonial lens.

Statement: As a Central American living in the United States, specifically in California, my experiences and connections to Latinx identity have come from a Mexican perspective. Despite been surrounded by people who I share similarities with, I often feel a sense of loss of identity and culture, and a longing to understand my place as a Nicaragüense in the United States. This series deals with intersecting concepts of immigration, cultural identity, feminism, and the impacts of Imperialism and colonialism in Latin America; as well as the impacts this has had on my personal life and body. 

Tag Christof
Bio: Tag Christof is a latino artist and writer based in Los Angeles and Santa Fe, NM. His work explores the intersections of design and culture and questions society’s blind pursuit of innovation for its own sake. He is an MA graduate of Central Saint Martins in London and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Intercept, Vogue Spain, El País, Grafik, apartamento, and others. 

Statement: Photos selected here are from “El Fogón” (The Fireplace) and “Crescit Eundo” (It Grows as It Goes), long-term explorations of the artist’s home culture of northern New Mexico. The first considers broad representations of its marginalized hispanidad, its antique dialect, car culture, and intimate connection to the land. The second is a consideration of the artist’s traditional hispanic family as it learns to evolve alongside drug abuse, comings out, transitions, and deaths. 

Tere Garcia
Bio: Tere Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Monterrey, NL, Mexico, and is based in Houston and New York. She graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art Photography and Digital Media. She recently graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City with a Masters of Fine Arts Photography. Her art practice has been an important tool to express, heal, and form narratives about her identity and the places where she exists. Garcia has been traveling and working along the United States and Mexico Border, confronting these boundaries that demolish and hinder unity. She intends to create and change the way these landscapes have been advertised, utilized and exploited to generate hate, displacement, and separation for humanity. Her interventions represent a peaceful gesture to start a conversation with society to unify us rather than separates us. 

Statement: The Anti-Monument is a body of work birthed out of my experience as an immigrant in the United States. I use the Border Wall and borderlands as my form of protest. The border itself speaks to the values of American society. Xenophobia has been planted since the genocide of the indigenous populations for land. This is best seen in the treatment of immigrant communities in the United States in 2020. My view of the border repurposes the fear of others to encompass unity in the intersectional community that is the US.    I am intertwining photosensitive paper in the fence to create photograms. The paper becomes a metaphor;  I am the paper. I am now in Mexico and the USA. I am in-between. The paper is shifting between two cultures, two languages, two different identities. It recorded power and domination. 

Lee Oscar Gomez
Lee Oscar Gomez immigrated from Mexico at an early age, developing a subtle awareness of the cultural differences he was introduced to. With a strong embodiment of record-keeping, Lee was influenced by his mother to capture all their experiences, living in America. Lee holds a Bachelor’s Degree of Fine Art, concentrating in Photography from San José State University. Lee’s body of work exhibits conceptual narratives, social, and environmental injustices while bringing into discussion these political issues.

Statement:

Papers will not grant me my freedom. Yet in America, citizenship is what permits my liberation. Mi Frontera began as an investigation of topography in the Indio Valley as I documented the Salton Sea. While I captured displaced objects among the landscape, buried emotions began blurring my consciousness. Barbed wire, abandoned essentials, and the preserved unhabitual terrain triggered suppressed memories I carried. I forced myself to connect with the landscape while I took self-portraits, but all that surfaced was a yearning of belonging. At the age of five, my family illegally transported me across “La Frontera,” the Mexican-American border, with intentions of a prosperous future. This body of work helped me develop critical affirmations with my contact to the terrain. Mi Frontera metaphorically embodies the wounds I haul throughout my life, while I work to dismantle the fear of my status in the United States. With these images, I share my experience and challenge viewers to join me as I navigate topics of migration, surveillance, sustainability, and displacement. Society values undocumented folx upon their immigration status therefore, I choose to rewrite this belief. Similar to that of the forgotten toothbrush, tire, and plastic bag caught on barbed wire, I too once traveled across this terrain. A part of me misplaced, but certainly not forgotten.

Diana Guerra
Bio: Diana Guerra is a photographer, filmmaker, and new media artist from Lima, Peru who is currently based in New York. She holds an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from the City College of New York and a Bachelor degree in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Guerra’s early training in photography was at Parsons School of Design as part of the MFA Photography and New Media program.

Statement: I use photography, film, and new media to focus on the complex duality that forms in the identities of Latinx immigrants living in New York City. I explore notions of family, home, and sense of belonging, which become ambiguous in this new environment. The simultaneous feeling of being neither here nor there opens up a conversation on how to visualize being in a third space that we create on a daily basis, and that shapes our diasporic identities.

Deb Leal
Bio: Deb Leal is a Multimedia Artist, Director & Photographer based in Oakland, CA. She received her BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and her work has been included in the deYoung Art Museum of San Francisco, LULAC conferences, and a breadth of publications from Vogue to Remezcla.  She is currently in pre-production for her third music video and can be found hand embroidering commissioned pieces under her brand, Handfast Hotel. 

Statement: It is rumored that growing up in a Chicanx Catholic family imprints a personal 'branding' that never leaves, even into an unpracticed adulthood. Leal picks moments that feel solitary & ritualistic for her subjects or dreamlike characters; a captured state of limbo that teeters on the brink of discord through one’s own carnal pathways. These photographs, in particular, serve as a continued exploration of the modern Latina standing at a crossroad of tradition and reclamation thereof. 

Chantal Lesley
Bio: Chantal is a conceptual photographer who uses photos to discover her identity, multiculturalism, and to understand the world around her. As a half German, half Peruvian woman who grew up along the U.S./Mexican border in Brownsville, TX, her work has a strong interest in issues of identity and feminism.  Her work focuses on personal narrative imagery that tells the story of what it means to be a modern millennial woman. 

Statement: "Anything But Brown" is a photo series that expresses my experience of growing up as a person of color in a world that idolized white skin. As a child, I did not see myself represented in magazines, movies, or in my favorite dolls, so when I was left alone to play I would try and replicate my Barbie's skin tone by covering myself in baby powder, believing this would make me "pretty".

Elisa Limon
Bio: Elisa graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a Bachelor of Arts. She has attended College for Creative Studies and Washtenaw Community College with the focus in Art and Photography. In the summer of 2018, she was selected for a fellowship with Documenting Detroit. While photography is her main focus at this time she also works in ceramics, glass blowing, mosaic, paint, and she is also a performance artist. Elisa is currently a board member for El Ballet Folklórico Estudiantil, a nonprofit organization that teaches youth traditional Mexican folk dances and mariachi music. Elisa has participated in a 2-week intensive dance workshop in San Juan Del Río, Querétaro, México. Elisa has also taught and ran a Folklórico dance group in Ann Arbor, MI for youth and adults. Elisa has always felt that culture and art intermingle and in much of her work she includes something that comes from her roots. Elisa has been selected to participate in various art shows in Michigan which include the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Scarab Club, Photoville (Brooklyn New York), and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Statement: Ballet Folklorico is more than smiling faces and colorful outfits, this traditional dance is about preserving cultural roots through practice, dedication, and commitment to community.

Christopher Lopez
Bio: Christopher Lopez, a photographer, was born in The Bronx, in 1984 and was raised between New York and Northern New Jersey. His photographic practice is mainly centered on exploring social issues regarding culture and identity. His work has been exhibited most notably in the major Caribbean art retrospective, “Caribbean Crosswords of the World”, which included over 100 years of Caribbean art from the regions most prominent artists. His works are currently in the permanent collections of El Museo Del Barrio, The World Trade Center Memorial Museum, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. He is also a teaching artist, having piloted the first program on photography and the process of photo bookmaking to ages K-12 through satellite programs in New York City with the Aperture Foundation. 

Statement: This image is from my series entitled, "A Visual Guide to the Heart". The project aimed to create visual interpretations of the music of iconic Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera. It explored the morality found in the music's lyrics evoking its raw power, socio-political significance, and intrinsic bond to the quotidian experience in the lives of Puerto Rican people. The image seen is of a protester on the grounds of the University of Puerto Rico during an occupation held by the student body in protest of mass budget cuts. A teacher recognizes her student from under his mask and shares a moment of embrace. 

Amanda Lopez
Bio: Amanda Lopez is a Mexican-American portrait photographer based in Los Angeles. Whether she's on assignment or photographing members of her family or friends, Lopez's camera eye looks for a balance of strength, vulnerability, and tenacity. Her work has appeared in publications like The Washington Post, Wired, Time and Beauty Inc.

Statement: A selection of images from my ongoing series Guadalupe, an exploration and reimagining of my relationship with Mexico's beloved patron saint.

Sophie Lopez
Bio: Sophie Lopez is a Mexican American documentary artist, working in the mediums of film photography, sculpture, and light projection. Often engaging with topics of immigration policy and identity within the Midwestern landscape. Also incorporating social practice into her work through teaching photography. Currently, she is pursuing a BFA with an emphasis in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (‘21).

Statement: In this work, I am exploring the space of factual exchange, using my mother’s living and breathing archive as the source of material and inspiration. Utilizing a camera, a tool of violence, to dislodge the colonial histories imposed upon my being. I do not intend to tell the truth, rather I promise to lie, cheat, and steal.

Gabi Magaly
Bio: Gabi Magaly is an emerging artist that received her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2020. Magaly has exhibited in solo shows at Satellite Gallery, Huntsville, TX; Presa House Gallery, San Antonio, TX; Casa Lu, Mexico City. Her numerous group exhibitions include at Luis Leu Gallery, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio, TX; Won Best in Show at “56th Annual Juried Competition Exhibition” at Masur Museum in Monroe, Louisiana. She was awarded two CAMMIE awards from Blue Star Contemporary and Luminaria Contemporary Cultural Center.

Statement: My woven blankets reference Catholic Saints I heard growing up, with a critical view of women who were told not to own their sexuality and to not question these religious saints. My self-portraits reproduce a modern-day version of saints using my own image as all the saints. As a child, I was told to look up to saints that never looked like me, all of them were fair-skinned with blue eyes none of them had brown skin with brown eyes. By reproducing them with brown skin, I am creating a more relatable representation that is more inclusive. 

Eric Magaña
Bio: Eric Magaña is an artist from Norwalk, California (b. 1994). The apparatus of his artistic practice is rooted within his deep connection to his family and its history. Drawing from his personal experience of being Chicanx and working across media, Magaña’s work investigates the relations between culture, labor, displacement, and identity. Magaña holds an AA-T in Studio Art from Cerritos College (2018) and is currently earning his BFA in Photography at NYFA (LA Campus).

Statement: In Reconociendo A Martín Y La Mora, I'm exploring the relationship between myself and my grandfather, Martin Barbosa. Utilizing his image as a departure point to investigate labor, agriculture, my heritage, and his battle with Alzheimer’s. It’s allowed me to dive into my roots, connecting to my grandfather as I embody his positionality, in his land – bringing forth ancestral ideas and belonging – battling between what I have lost and what has become mine. 

Mujeres Malas
Bio: Mujeres Malas is the artistic partnership of Natalia Barrientos and Jessica Carolina González. Utilizing Mujeres Malas as a transformative space, they channel their collective rage to create works of various media sin culpa y sin miedo (without guilt, without fear).   Natalia and Jessica are based in Houston, Texas.

Statement: Cosechada en Tierra Santa, Consumida por la Plaga… Eres mi Fruta Favorita. To be Latinx is to be in constant combat. We fight against the hierarchies that exclude us and the ones built within us. Just like fruit, we bear the violent histories of dehumanizing labor and exploitation that continue to nurture the oppressor. The exportation of our fruits, like the battle, is eternal.   La sobrevivencia de la fruta siempre será amenazada por la plaga.

Veronica Melendez
Bio: Veronica Melendez is a visual artist based out of Washington D.C. Through photographs documenting the diaspora of Central Americans within the D.C. metro area, her work speaks to the broader theme of how we as humans create home. Having been raised in and around D.C within one of the largest Central American communities in the United States, her work serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of representation in art.

Statement: These photographs are from 3 different projects: Le Pido a Dios (2011-2012), Federal City (2014-2015), and Las Hijas de Olivia (2019- present) and were all made in and around Washington D.C. while photographing within my communities. 

Marisol Mendez
Bio: Marisol Mendez is a Bolivian photographer and researcher. She uses her camera to study the tension between truth and fiction, the tight relationship between what a photograph creates and the (sur)real it comes from.  Marisol received a BA in Audiovisual Communication at Universidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires and a Masters in Fashion Photography at the University of the Arts, London. She has exhibited across Europe, Argentina, and Bolivia and her work has been featured internationally.

Statement: Although Bolivia is a pluricultural country with a rich loom of femininity, the representation of women remains whitewashed and phallocentric. To this day, Catholicism and class struggles permeate our understanding of womanhood with Catholic dogmas reinforcing society’s Madonna-Whore complex and inequality manifesting as the under and misrepresentation of indigenous and mestizo women. MADRE was conceived to challenge this inherent machismo and celebrate the diversity and complexity of my culture through the portrayal of its women.

Steven Molina Contreras
Bio: Steven Molina Contreras was born in 1999, in San Salvador, El Salvador. Molina Contreras holds a BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology. His work has been exhibited in group shows in NYC and NJ, and has been published by Aperture, the New Yorker, and Humble Arts Foundation to name a few. Most recently, he has given lectures at the SVA and at FIT. He is also an Artist-in-Residence at Lightwork for the 2021 season.

Statement: The images I’m submitting are part of my project, Adelante. In Adelante translated to Forward in English, I bring together and survey the different bodies of work I’ve collaborated and made with my immigrant family, in NY and El Salvador for the past three years—reflecting and exposing the evocative moments, deep-rooted emotions, and weighted consequences endured with being an immigrant in the United States. 

Martha Naranjo Sandoval
Bio: Martha Naranjo Sandoval is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and visual artist from Mexico City.  Her work focuses on the materiality of image; in the difference between how time is portrayed in moving and still image; and in how images gain significance culturally. 

Statement: 35 mm Diary is a collection of quotidian pictures captured on film. I started taking these pictures in 2014 when I moved from Mexico City to Brooklyn. As of 2020, the collection contains 259 film rolls archived in chronological order and organized with contact sheets. 

Johan Orellana
Bio: Johan Orellana is a photographer with roots in Ecuador and Spain that resides in Brooklyn, New York. At the moment, he is pursuing two B.A. degrees, one in Photography and the other in Spanish Studies at Bard College.

Statement: These photographs represent the complexity of what it means to be Latinx. There are multiple factors playing in the creation of these images such as religion, love, displacement, adaptation, and exploration.

Lexi Parra
Bio: Lexi Parra is a Venezuelan-American visual storyteller and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. She has a joint degree in Photography and Human Rights from Bard College. Parra has contributed to publications like Huck Magazine, VICE World News, and The Guardian. She was a 2020 finalist for the Howard Chapnick Grant, 2020 Women Photograph Workshop attendee, and is a member of the local WP Caracas chapter.     She is the founder of Project MiRA (Look), an arts education initiative that fosters visual literacy and critical analysis with youth in the barrios of Caracas.

Statement: This series explores a collective sense of identity and belonging in today’s Venezuela. Six years into a gripping crisis, this is a country full of juxtapositions: wealth and poverty, violence, and beauty. And within the surreal chaos, life continues on. In returning to my family’s home country, I look to share the stories of resilience, sub-cultures that create community, and complicate the understanding of Venezuela’s identity beyond political polarization. 

Adam Perez
Bio: Adam Perez is an award-winning freelance filmmaker, photographer, based in Los Angeles, CA. His work centers on intimate stories that expose the nuances of race, gender, identity, and culture.  

Statement: #Chicosverdes is an on-going portrait series that centers on reframing images of brown boys and nature. For too long, images of young brown boys created by people outside our community have propagated stereotypes that have failed to capture our lived experiences. My intent is to make you question your image of a young brown boy. 

Fernando Rocha
Bio: Fernando Rocha is a senior at American University and an aspiring cinematographer. His focus is on projects that highlight voices from marginalized backgrounds in both documentary and narrative settings.

Statement: This project is about his grandmother, Lucy, and her relationship with her home in Mexico City. This series tries to show how her home has become a regufe, a reminder of her life with his late grandfather Polo yet also a constant reminder of her loneliness.

Carlos Rocha
Bio: Carlos Rocha is a Mexican-American photographer based in Austin, TX. His imagery explores the quotidian life as it relates to community, humanity, and belief. A first-generation immigrant born in Matamoros, MX, his work is imbued with his cultural ties as well as a pursuit of compelling composition, hue, and narrative.

Statement: The selected photos are part of a project highlighting urban altars in Mexico City. Over a span of 2 years, I have collected street altar images and still lifes along the way.

Raul Rodriguez
Bio: Raul Rodriguez is a photographer artist, curator, and educator from Fort Worth, Texas. He graduated with a BFA from the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design. His work investigates communities and cultures like skateboarding, boxing, and Lucha Libre, as well as social justice topics linked to the Latinx identity. His projects reveal the layers and complexities of his personal and cultural experience as a first-generation Mexican-American.

Statement: These photographs represent my investigation into the “brown experience” as it exists across the intersectional identity of Latinidad. Through my own lens as a first-generation Mexican-American and the relationships I've formed in my life, my images capture nuanced expressions that symbolize the cultural, intimate, and distinct experiences of Latinx people in the U.S. These details hide in plain sight as we further disassemble the monolithic identity used to categorize and suppress our community.

Nemo Rodriguez
Bio: Nemo Rodriguez (b. 1982) is a first-generation, Latinx photographer and activist currently living in the Bay Area. She primarily works with an 8x10 film camera. Rodriguez has a background in social justice advocacy and holds an MA in human rights studies, with a BA in civil rights–era history and literature. Her graduate work on the history of photography in the human rights movement informs her own photography, especially her current work documenting ongoing protests. 

Statement: Since early June, I’ve been documenting the massive protest movement taking place in my local community and the greater Bay Area. This radical, progressive revolution—fighting for racial justice and systemic change—includes a diverse group of Latinx organizers, activists, and families impacted by police brutality. Mindful of the constraints of documentary photography, I’ve tried to frame these pictures of protests and protesters through a measured and contemplative lens.

Renee Romero
Bio: Renee Romero is a visual artist from Belen, New Mexico. She has a BA in studio arts with a concentration in photography and arts management from the University of New Mexico. Romero's work explores her identity, relationships, and domestic life as a mother, using film-based imagery from polaroids to medium format film. 

Statement: The work I'm submitting is a collection of film and instant images taken of myself and family through my pregnancy and motherhood. Using photography as a medium, I'm always turning the lens towards myself and those around me to find myself and how I fit into this space as an artist, a mother, a daughter. 

Jaklin Romine
Bio: Jaklin Romine was born in Burbank, California, and currently lives in East Los Angeles.  She studied Studio Arts at Cal State LA, where she was selected to be part of the Luckman Project. She then showed in galleries around Los Angeles, such as Gallery 825, and Avenue 50, before completing her Masters of Fine Arts at CalArts. Since graduating Romine has been selected to participate in the Emerging Artist 2018 show at the Barnsdall Art Park and continued to show in group shows in New York at New Women Space and In Los Angeles at Navel, and again at Avenue 50 studios. While also being asked to participate in artists talks about her work at the Torrance Museum and The Main Museum. Then her work was featured in multiple issues of Full Blede and at the beginning of 2019 she was featured on the cover in conjunction with a group show at Noysky Projects in Hollywood. While also continuing to ride the wave of art success she was nominated and received the Rema Hort Foundation 2019 emerging artist grant. Which she used to create her latest body of work that was shown in her first solo show at PSLA called Why bring me flowers when I’m dead ? When you had the time to do it when I was alive / Living with SCI. 

Statement: Photos that I'm going to be submitting or a combination of my photo media installation work and of my protest performance work. Both our parts of my art practice but are definitely two different areas of my practice.

Guadalupe Sanchez
Bio: Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Guadalupe Sanchez obtained her BFA in Studio Art at Texas Christian University. Growing up with first-generation immigrant parents, her fascination was cultivated through familial stories and experiences of immigration and assimilation within the U.S. Her practice explores the use of photographs that document her family before and after they emigrated to Texas permanently, as well as promoting colloquial language and customs as used by the Latinx community.

Statement: The photos I am submitting archive the lives of my parents as they have assimilated through the United States, specifically Texas. It is also a commentary on how working-class immigrant parents have always had to find a balance between working laborious jobs, remaining connected to their culture, and the pressure of having to succeed for future generations.

Jess Saldaña
Bio: jess saldaña is an imperfect chicanx-crypto-jew, non-binary, activist, art worker, and scholar interested in interdependency within environmental systems and social relations. They were spawned near a factory on the Southside of Chicago and raised to the song of Mexican prayers and loud piano music. Poetry, photographs, paintings, and drawings have been featured in the following; Hoochi Media (2018), Stonewall’s Legacy: Poetry Anthology (2019), Entropy Magazine (2019), among others.

Statement: Working with artist and friend Alex Salerno, this series seeks to render Latinx, trans, non-binary life in public. The beach acts as a permeable borderline between earth and sea, collaborating with the body performing in the fluid landscape. The images are taken using 35mm film and manual camera techniques.

Alán Serna
Bio: Alán Serna is a mixed media artist from Huanusco, Zacatecas now living and working in San Antonio, TX. In 2018, Serna earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from the University of Kentucky and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2015 from the University of Texas at San Antonio where he is currently a professor of painting and foundations.

Statement: These works chronicle my family’s personal and political immigrant narratives through the deconstruction and re-composing of photos from family archives, smartphone photographs and screenshots. These works touch on personal aspects of my upbringing, my relationship to labor, and simultaneous feelings of nostalgia and displacement.  

Arturo Soto
Bio: Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer and writer. He holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, and postgraduate degrees from University College London and the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally and he published his first photobook, "In the Heat," in 2018. 

Statement: Over the last twenty years, Juárez has endured extreme violence as a consequence of drug trafficking. I grew up listening to my father's stories about his youth there, before NAFTA altered the urban and social fabric of the city. Following Edward Soja’s remark that biographies are geographies as much as they are histories, the photographs, and texts in Border Documents recount sites on both sides of the border that my father associates with specific memories.

Erika Nina Suárez
Bio: Erika Nina Suarez (she/her) is a photographer currently living and working in Fort Worth, Texas. She completed a BFA in photography at The University of North Texas in 2019. Her work is primarily made utilizing a medium format view camera. Suarez’s current body of work highlights concepts of intimate familial relationships, the irrevocable need to bear witness to habitual sensations, and investigates her own identity through her Hungarian and Nicaragüense parentage.

Statement: In order to explore the dynamic between individuals that are in complex and multi-layered relationships, Erika Nina Suárez focuses on those closest to her. In this ongoing body of work, Suarez continuously highlights themes that examine her point of view as a voyeur within her own family, endearment towards “found” family, and the spaces within the home that continue to serve as places of emotional attachment to her subjects.

Theo Tajes
Bio: Theo Tajes is a photographer, screenwriter, and film director. His work moves between fiction and documentary, often mixing the two genres, usually addressing urgent issues in Latin American societies, regarding gender and racial issues. He started his career as a photographer and nowadays he works with hybrid projects, mixing audiovisual with photographic essays. 

Statement: Transvestite Heart is a project developed for and with the Art Collective As Travestidas, a group focused on gender issues, which develops projects in theater, music, and Carnival. Many of its members are trans and much of their narratives incorporate personal dramas. For this project, I followed As Travestidas during a tour that went through the most transphobic cities in Brazil, one of the most transphobic countries in the world, portraying them behind the scenes.

Athena Torri
Bio: Athena Torri (b. 1989) is an Ecuadorian Italian artist. Born in Milan, Torri grew up in Quito, Ecuador before immigrating to the United States. Torri has a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design, and a General Studies Certificate from the International Center of Photography.  Her solo show, titled "Land of Opportunities", was exhibited at Deli Gallery in New York. Conveyor Editions in New Jersey published Torri's first monograph, The Outsider. Torri's group shows include exhibitions at the International Center of Photography Triennial in New York, Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Re: Art Show 21 in Brooklyn, NY, Serpentine Galleries in London, and Stitching Electron in the Netherlands.

Statement: Athena Torri's series Between Mountains, Valleys, explores her personal narrative within the Ecuadorian Andes, highlighting a history of colonization that manifests in both the nation of Ecuador and within herself, a mixed-race Latin American Queer person. Inspired by the oral history and legends of the Andes, Torri engages with Andean folklore to examine themes of gender, sexuality, and race in postcolonial South America. Her work depicts the collision of the sacred and mundane worlds in everyday postcolonial life and plays with cultural artifacts such as ceremonial masks to explore her own agency in adopting or rejecting colonial constructions of Latin American masculinity and whiteness.

German Vazquez
Bio: German Ayala Vazquez is a Photographer / Visual Artist. Born in Bayamón Puerto Rico, raised in New York, and is currently living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a 2020 candidate for  Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Ayala Vazquez was awarded The Adolf and Geraldine Paire full scholarship to The University of the Arts in 2018 to complete his studies in photography. During this time, he was able to continue interests in editorial and fashion photography while gaining expertise in the studio environment. Over the years Ayala Vazquez has won multiple awards for outstanding studio work from Profoto and the 2020 TheNikon/Ben Rose Prize. He has also been featured in multiple publications including Vogue Italia, and Hunger Magazine. His main focus is to be working in the Fashion Photography Industry, as an outlet to focus on conceptual and specific bodies of work to represent for the LGBTQ+, and LatinX community by using my personal experiences, and ideas that relate to religion and sexuality as a way to comment on how it affects the LGBTQ+ community mentally and physically particularly in colonized regions.

Statement: These photos are based on my personal point of view when it comes to religion and sexuality and how we are condemned by our culture and family for being LGBTQ+!

Jennifer Villanueva
Bio: Jennifer Villanueva is a Mexican-American photographer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work concentrates on the ways ethnicity, social economics, gender, and class contribute to American society through documenting the life of her immigrant family which explores their relationship and identity between Mexico and the United States.

Statement: My photographs document the life of my immigrant family and explore their relationship and identity between Mexico and the United States. In my recent work, I am focused on documenting the life of my undocumented grandmother who has been going through dialysis due to kidney failures for over 10 years and is recovering from recent hospitalizations. I am also centered on researching the history and experience of my immigrant parents’ migration and labor in the United States.

Sabato Visconti
Bio: Sabato Visconti is a Brazilian-born photographer based in Western Massachusetts. Sabato’s work seeks to reconfigure traditional understanding of photography and digital media, by interrogating how hegemonic structures distort and influence individual subjects.  Sabato began experimenting with glitch processes in 2011 with the help of a defective memory card that randomly wrote zeroes on JPEG files. Since then, his work with glitch and digital media has been exhibited throughout the world, including spaces like Tate Britain, ICA Boston, The SPRING/BREAK Art Show, LACDA, and the FILE Festival. His work has also appeared in TIME, Vogue, WIRED, NYT, and AI-AP’s “Latin American Fotografia 4” Anthology.

Statement: DACALOGUE is a study of immigration media and undocumentedness as it pertains to the artist's experience with the DACA program from 2013 to 2018. By fusing expressionistic scanner photography techniques with a “glitch art ethics” of deconstructing media, DACALOGUE depicts a livelihood conditioned by immigration documents, work authorization cards, biometrics, and the lack thereof, revealing the contradictions between the actuality of the living immigrant and the personhood afforded by state authorities.

Martín Wannam
Bio: Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is a visual artist and educator whose work looks critically at the historical, social, and political climate of Central America, specifically examining its impact on the queer individual. He uses photography, sculpture, and performance as a tool of iconoclasm for a constant evaluation of systematic structures such as religion, folklore, and wester beauty standards through a queer lens.

He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in Spring 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and their BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, and Korea. Wannam is the recipient of a Special Mention in the category Serie in PHOTO PRIDE 2020, Fulcrum Fund 516 (2020), Coke Newhall Photo Fellowship (2020), MaryAnn Evans Grant (2019), SPE Student Award for Innovations in Imaging (2018), and Site Scholar (2018-2019). Currently, he resides in Albuquerque, NM working with Szu-Han Ho, Bernadine Hernandez, and Hazel Batrezchavez in the Fronteristxs Collective to end migrant detention and abolish the carceral state.

Statement: Part of my ongoing series La Eterna Resistencia,  a project that looks critically at the social and political climate of Guatemala, specifically examining its impact on queer individuals. In my country, we are subjected to different types of violence, enacted by the state and the culture. This project focus on “queering” our Guatemalan folklore and traditions by protesting, resisting, and creating alternative narratives/iconographies but at the same time engaging with iconoclasm. 

Sergio Ximenez
Bio: Sergio Ximenez (b. 1988, Los Angeles) is a conceptual photographic artist creating contemporary art in dialogue with newsworthy situations and current events, critiquing societal constructs and ideologies. His work delves into the prevalence of lens-based capturing, recording, and monitoring devices in our society, ease in the proliferation of these devices into our everyday lives, and how power dynamics attached to these devices can affect, influence, even control, human behavior between and amongst removed observer and observed subjects.

Statement: Dashes & Dots ~ The utilization of lens-based technologies for evidence in judicial processes is nothing new. With law enforcement using recordings for purposes of keeping step-by-step accounts of confrontations and associations with private citizens, public servants depend on this technology to stand in as the truth.  However, once these recordings escape the grasp of private processes and into public sphere, the original intentions of such imagery changes. Dashes & Dots explores these unintended consequences.

Armando Zamora
Bio: Armando Zamora is an interdisciplinary artist from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received a BFA in photography from Parsons The New School of Design in 2016 and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. His work explores themes of truth, reality, perception, and the tension of not knowing. He currently lives and works in South Florida.​

Statement: This series, is that all there is?, is about the tension of not knowing. Not knowing who you are or why you are. As a first-generation Mexican-American I have always felt too white for my family in Mexico and too Mexican for my friends in the US. To me, a painful but real part of being Latinx is feeling like you don’t belong- like you don’t know where you should be.