September 15, 2018 - January 19, 2019
extended through March 23, 2019
In her first solo museum exhibition, artist Guadalupe Rosales explores the radical potential of the archive in a new immersive installation including a two-channel video, sculptures featuring archival materials, a collaged wall work, a payphone sound piece, and an altar honoring her cousin who passed away from gang violence. The exhibition investigates collective histories within Latinx youth culture in Los Angeles, reflecting everyday experiences in communities of color in the 1990s, from private spaces such as the teenage bedroom, to cruising, parties and other forms of socializing. Drawing on documentation, flyers, magazines, ephemera and objects from the period, Rosales activates memory through an environment that suggests both personal and group experiences. Within the exhibition, the artist affirms images and shared histories of young women of color, while pointing to recollection and remembrance as a collaborative, shared conversation.
Working intersectionally across her own artistic practice and the discipline of digital humanities, Rosales upends power relations that are part of the historical process by creating a community-sourced online archive using the platforms of social media. On Instagram, her account Veteranas and Rucas is dedicated to Latinas raised in Southern California, while Map Pointz focuses on youth active in the SoCal 90s party crew and rave scene. Through a reciprocal relationship with the public, Rosales shares the messages of those submitting to her accounts, and provides detailed information about the images provided by the contributor, such as identifying party crew members, acknowledging wedding anniversaries and birthdays, naming family members in the photos, as well as specific streets and neighborhoods where the images were taken. By presenting personal and family narratives alongside the images, her work engages in storytelling, as she implements a process of writing a different public history about Latinx youth culture across the region.
Guadalupe Rosales is an artist and archivist based in Los Angeles. She is founder and operator of Veteranas and Rucas and Map Pointz, digital archives accessible through Instagram. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Commonwealth & Council, Bemis Art Center (Omaha, Nebraska), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. In 2016, Rosales took over The New Yorker’s social media for a week and was one of the top-rated takeovers of the year. Her subsequent role as the inaugural Instagram Artist in Residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Artsy, and Artforum. She has lectured at numerous museums and academic institutions, including the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), New York University (NYU), and The Graduate Center in New York, among others. She received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.
