Join the co-curators of MOA’s new feature exhibition, Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers / Soñadores + creadores del cambio, Jill Baird and Greta de León and select exhibition artists, including David Zamora Casas, Linda Vallejo, Delilah Montoya, Judith Baca, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, and Alfred Quiroz. The artists will share more about their works in the exhibition, revealing their various artistic approaches towards addressing the personal, social and political issues of our time.

Bios

David Zamora Casas is an award-winning multimedia genderfluid painter, performance activist, and installation artist who has engaged audiences under the pseudonym Nuclear Meltdown since 1985. Casas’ work, which focuses on LGBTQ+ and marginalized communities, features his refusal to be marginalized by mainstream, conservative, heteronormative systems. His practice is also informed by the experience of living in the US-Mexico borderland of Aztlán, and presents layered manifestations from a Joto Tejano, American-Xicanx perspective. David Zamora Casas describes his life/art practice as a conscious, radical decision to create and move forward dialogue that strives for an inclusive, eco-friendly, empathetic world.

Linda Vallejo creates works that investigate contemporary cultural and political issues, visualizing what it means to be a person of color in the United States. She states that these works reflect what she calls her “brown intellectual property”—the experiences, knowledge, and feelings gathered over more than four decades of study of Latino, Chicana/o, and American Indigenous culture and communities. She has produced hundreds of works in the “Make ‘Em All Mexican” series (2010-2021), painting various vintage and Victorian antiques brown, as well as The Brown Dot Project, a series of data pictographs where brown dots signify US Latino data and statistics.

Delilah Montoya is a photographic printmaker based in New Mexico, the ancestral home of her mother’s family. Her work is grounded in the mestizo/a experience of the Southwest and borderlands. As a photographic printmaker, Montoya consistently pushes the boundaries of what is technically possible and conceptually challenging, always returning the documentary gaze. As a Chicana feminist and a product of a strong matriarchal tradition, her work explores the unusual relationships that result from negotiating different ways of seeing the world around her. She positions her work as an alternative to the mainstream and aligns herself from a mestizaje perspective.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz is a conceptual artist from Texas known for her diverse multimedia works, including artist’s books, photography, installation, and public art. The book Celia Álvarez Muñoz by writer/poet Roberto Tejada surveys her career. Muñoz’s work has been nationally and internationally exhibited, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art 1991 Biennial; her latest cataloged exhibition is Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985, which toured in the US and Brazil (2017 – 2018).

Judith F. Baca has been creating public art for four decades.  Her murals are powerful in size and subject matter, and bring art to where people live and work. In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’ first mural program, that has produced over 400 murals and employed thousands of local participants. It has evolved into the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) where Baca serves as artistic director.

Alfred J. Quiroz tackles injustices with a sense of humour and an edge of satire. Deeply researched, the events he highlights in his works are often forgotten traumas or racial stereotypes offered up with glossy garish paint. Now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, Quiroz has enjoyed a long history as an art educator, joining the University in 1989 as an Assistant Professor and retiring in 2008. In 2006 he was commissioned by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago to create a piece for the travelling exhibition African Presence in Mexico, and he has also designed theatre sets and community murals nationally and internationally.

This event was funded in part by a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the organizers and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.