Eva Aguila, Frequency of Memory (image still), 2025, Video and sound installation. Courtesy of the artist
SATURDAY, JULY 12, 2025, 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Join us for a two-panel program focused on the histories, geographies, and politics represented in the exhibition Eva Aguila: Vino de Sangre. Artists and scholars from California and Mexico will discuss the intersections of wine, colonialism, and decolonial aesthetics, reflecting on the importance of these issues today.
Light refreshments will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.
event schedule
- 1:00 PM – 1:15 PM
Welcome and Introductions - 1:15 PM – 2:00 PM
Wine as a Tool for Colonization: Presentations and Discussion with Eva Aguila, Julia Ornelas-Higdon, and Gloria Ortega (Moderator) - 2:00 PM – 2:20 PM
Break with Refreshments - 2:20 PM – 3:05 PM
Indigeneity and Decolonial Aesthetics: Presentations and Discussion with Isaac Michael Ybarra, Mariana Botey, and Joseph Valencia (Moderator) - 3:05 PM – 3:25 PM
Group Discussion & Q&A - 3:25 PM – 3:30 PM
Closing Remarks
SPEAKER BIOS
Eva Aguila is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer based in Los Angeles. Her work spans video, sound, and installation, incorporating research and oral histories from the Mexican diaspora, particularly her ancestral communities in rural Michoacán. Inspired by ephemerality and Indigenous Futurism, she uses time-based media to depict stories and alternative histories that reinterpret cultural portrayals of diaspora. Aguila has exhibited and performed across the United States, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In 2015, she co-founded Coaxial Arts Foundation, a nonprofit supporting experimental sound, video, and performance artists. She holds an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art and Design and a BFA from the School of Theater at CalArts.
Isaac Michael Ybarra (Tongva, Chumash, and Xicano) is a poet, visual artist, and storyteller based in Los Angeles County. As a steward of Indigenous cultural conservation, he utilizes film, photography, and poetry to amplify decolonial narratives and reclaim Indigenous pedagogies. Through art, Isaac seeks to challenge the dominance of the human experience and instead honors the interconnectedness of all beings. He embraces the values of Indigenous Futurism to retell the past and present, envisioning a future with his ancestral homelands guided by his community's stories, visions, and desires. He is a former California Creative Corps Fellow and a current Liberty Hill Environmental Leadership Initiative (ELI) fellow.
Julia Ornelas-Higdon is an Associate Professor of History at California State University, Channel Islands. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of race, agriculture, and labor histories, and she is a past recipient of a Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her book, The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769-1920, studies California’s 19th-century wine industry as a site of conquest and racialization. Ornelas-Higdon received her B.A. in History from Pomona College and went on to earn her Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California.
Mariana Botey is an art historian, artist, and curator born in Mexico City. She is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art History at UC San Diego. Her scholarship has greatly influenced the fields of Latin American art, decolonial studies, and Indigenous visual culture, highlighting themes of modernism, epistemic violence, and postcolonial conditions. Her experimental films have been shown at the Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, and REDCAT, among others. Botey received her Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In her first solo museum exhibition, artist Eva Aguila researches the history of the Mission grape and wine production in the Catholic mission system to examine the effects of colonization in what was once “Nueva España,” now Mexico and California. This immersive installation uses wine as a tool to recontextualize histories of agriculture, religion, and nation-building, illuminating the power of art to foster reflection and healing for Latinx and Indigenous peoples.