[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, everyone.
Thank you for joining us.
Today's program presented as part of the Wignall Museum's
Home Edition, a series of curated artists talks,
workshops, and discussions featuring
artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
I'm the Curator and Director of the Wignall Museum.
The Wignall museum is a teaching museum and interdisciplinary
arts Space that introduces Chaffey College students,
faculty, staff, and community members
to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy the museum seeks to enhance
the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we are situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga Campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tongva
people.
We offer our respect to the elders
both past, present, and future.
And hello my name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm the Assistant Curator at Wignall museum.
All programs in Home Edition will be recorded.
Please visit us at our website www.chaffey.edu/wignall
to access recordings.
We'll post announcements to our email subscribers
and social media when the videos are available on our website
to access.
Thank you.
And hello, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I'm the proprietor at the museum and the studio tech
for the studio arts department here at Chaffey College.
Briefly, I'll share a quick breakdown of today's program.
In a moment, Rebecca will share a bio for our guest Dulce
Soledad Ibarra.
Then Dulce will present for about a half an hour.
Then the remaining time will be available for Q&A.
Thanks, Roman and Andy.
We're pleased to introduce artist, designer, and curator
Dulce Soledad Ibarra.
As a practicing artist, Ibarra discusses
issues of generational guilt, and cultural identities,
and video installation, and performance.
And has been inviting the public to partake
in the dialogue via workshops and participatory work.
Looking through a queer Chicano perspective,
the work is fueled by emotional labor, personal research,
and analysis.
Currently, Ibarra's work is centered
around the Pinata Party Supply District of downtown Los
Angeles engaging in the means of sustaining
as a community of businesses and as a place
of cultural familiarities and commodities.
Ibarra has exhibited screened and performed at venues
across Southern California.
Ibarra earned a BFA in Sculpture from the Cal State University
Long Beach, and an MFA from the University
of Southern California.
She's also an alum of Chaffey College.
So we're thrilled to have her with us today.
Please see her full biography in the program
guide on our website, or visit Dulce's website directly.
So please join me in welcoming Dulce Soledad Ibarra.
It's a real great pleasure to be asked
to participate in these talks considering I just
have a long history with Chaffey as an institution
and the Wignall museum, in particular.
I think I met Rebecca and Roman about 10 years ago working
at the museum as a student staff member.
And so that long winded history and connection
still thrives today.
And so it's very honorable to be here.
I think we'll start off with some slides.
And this is just an image of me.
I think about the curiosity--
I've always felt I was a child in different schemes of things.
So I just wanted to give a little preview of me.
Yeah.
But my work really emphasizes the ideas
of identity, and play, and labor,
and as well as thinking about community,
and as a whole and space sustaining.
And through my work, it's just progressed,
and also utilizing different types
of materials or means of production
to illustrate those topics.
And the next slide I have my undergrad work.
I started off the slide show with my work
that I created at Chaffey.
I utilize these--
I was interested in the idea as a painter,
but also thinking about painting in different ways
and how that changes and just challenging
what painting could be.
But while also thinking about the fragility of materials.
So I got my degree in sculpture.
But I started off in the 2D mostly.
And the 2D was just a vehicle for 3D for me.
These works were made with tissue paper
instead of paint, and as well as incorporation of papier mache.
I utilized the craft of [INAUDIBLE]
and also coined the term papel pintado,
which means painted paper, but also is another way of saying
wallpaper.
And thinking about the textiles and iconography
of Mexican culture while also thinking
about this adversity of thinking of illness.
I have OCD.
And at the time, I didn't really realize that.
But also thinking about the illness of the mind
and how that also revolves around the illness of the body
too.
So yeah, this is just work that started,
and I think it still relates to what I'm doing now,
particularly aesthetically.
So I'm thinking about how to combine both the 2D
with the 3D, and also this application
of a very fragile and impermanent material
to create layers and pictorial imagery.
And then we'll end with the last slide, which is just
another example of that.
And also utilizing different objects that I picked up.
So it was my initiation of thinking of sculpture
within painting as I was moving away from paintings.
But I still move into painting a lot too.
And then that was all at Chaffey.
So this is part of my time as a student under the Student
Invitational course and exhibition, which
is a really great art honors program that is still
at Chaffey now that I was just so honored to be part of it.
And I wanted to start off the slides with that.
Moving on to as I transferred into Cal State Long Beach,
I really honed into sculpture and material a lot more.
And I grew up--
I went to high school in this is quite mostly
upper middle class, mostly conservative town.
And it was hard for me to--
I was grappling with the ideas of my own identity
within these parameters of living situation.
And for a long time, it took me a while
to kind of take pride in the labor of my family,
of my parents, of being part of this migrant story,
and carrying that with me.
And so I ended up working with materials that--
my dad is a gardener.
And so he would also keep a lot of his old tools,
and older motors that didn't function anymore,
but still had like all of this history to it.
It spoke in ways.
And so these were kind of thinking
about the narrative of building that pride in a lot of ways,
and also considering kind of the guilt that I have of like,
having my much older father continuously work
under the hot sun just so that we can have food on the table.
So the next slide is kind of a more overview
of the whole installation.
This work is called Manos de Oro, Golden Hands.
And the reason I was utilizing gold at that time
was because both myself and my father
have allergic reaction to gold jewelry.
And that's something that for me became
this metaphor of having this allergy to living
in the upper middle class, like an allergy to luxury
in general.
And so like this story of constantly working
is something that I consider like this was his craft,
and I'm just utilizing my craft to uplift that.
So the next slide, I have a video,
where we could just watch.
It's quite brief.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAWNMOWER SOUNDS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAWNMOWER SOUNDS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yeah, so utilizing both this kind
of romantic idea of his labor, but also
the reality and the harshness of the machinery juxtaposed
to one another, it was kind of something
that I was interested in.
And as I continue to talk about migration and familial
narratives, I went into speaking about my aunt, which
is next installation, who my late aunt who
passed when I was 22, but raised me mostly as my parents both
worked full time.
And she was someone that was quite a collector of things,
of just things.
And a lot of it growing up was kind of overwhelming,
and I didn't understand the idea of wanting
to keep so much all the time.
But when she passed, what happened
was that we suddenly had so much attachment to everything
that she ever owned.
So while there was like this room in the house that
was hers, we didn't want to let go of it,
so we instead, my father and his friends
built another room in their backyard
that would house and continue to house
a lot of the same collections that she
had when she was alive.
So what I did was take a lot of the furnishings,
a lot of the objects, and created an installation that
reminded me of this room that was painted yellow,
for whatever reason, yellow for me, represents warmth,
but also it just represented like an embrace.
And when I think about embraces, I think about her touch
specifically.
And so taking a few look around the installation,
I created kind of like this box that where people
could actually interact with.
People would go into it and play with things.
There was the piano that was always so enticing
for people to want to interact with, but also the drawers.
And there was also music boxes that I created for it.
And just thinking about dolls and ownership,
and how when she lived she was an undocumented person,
and how much trauma it was for her to grow up so poor,
but come to this nation finally and to just own things
was a very powerful thing, and something
she never wanted to let go.
And so it was interesting for someone
to take ownership of all these objects in a space
where she didn't feel she could own a land that
didn't see her belonging.
So thinking about all of that, thinking
about all the arrangements.
This installation was called those recuerdos.
Recuerdos is a term for memories,
but it's also a term for these trinkets
that you get at the end of the celebration.
So in kind of the corner, I actually
have one of the shelves right there right next to me.
But there's these little trinkets
for baptisms, for weddings, for these takeaways.
And so I ended up creating in front
the piano people could also take away
these booklets, these zines that had text of journalings
that I did during my time of thinking about things.
And also kind of thinking about the iconography of that space.
And when I think about how much it is to own something, and how
these are just artifacts, and she was just the director
of the museum herself.
So I kind of honored that in that way too.
As I was kind of thinking about like placement a lot,
I also started thinking about displacement too.
So in this category of it, I used to--
or I still do, maybe not right now, but I am an educator,
and I've always done workshops and instructions.
And one of the workshops that I do frequently, or did
frequently, not right now, is pinata workshops.
And when I would introduce pinatas to communities,
I would also talk about the history of the pinatas.
And the history is that they were introduced by the Spanish.
They were a game that was created
for them for this initiation of conversion.
And the original pinata was made with seven points, like a star.
And those seven points represented seven deadly sins.
And when you would play this game with this paper craft that
was created, paper ceramic craft that was created,
the object was to break it.
And to break the pinata that would
mean for you to break away from your sins, and then eventually,
get the gifts that reaped from you being a good Christian,
a good Catholic.
So this was a game for Indigenous folks.
And this was a tool of genocide and displacement
in Mexico and the Americas of all sorts.
So I talked about that within this work
too, where instead of using the traditional pinatas,
we know them to be shaped as well.
So I started mapping out different areas
of Boyle Heights.
And this was a home--
I currently live in Boyle Heights now too.
And this is a home that had an eviction notice on it
placed on one of the doors.
And I did three different types of pinatas,
three different structures.
It was that apartment complex, one of a gallery
that was famously dis-faced with,
"Fuck White Art" written across it.
And also this other vacant space that had gallery owner
interest, which a lot of the folks of Boyle Heights
were protesting about.
So you know, coming from a low income background,
I considered how my place now as I'm moving into,
and have been establishing myself within the arts,
working within the arts, and seeing the tension,
and how it's created between the two,
particularly in Los Angeles.
But we also kind of saw something
like that in the early 90's for New York.
But like these highly populated spaces,
and how everyone wants to live here,
and how art becomes like the pinata, a tool of displacement.
And just thinking about the awareness of how
to how we consider ourselves masters of our tools,
but also thinking about how we can actually
be more aware of how we use our tools,
and where our tools are being used.
So these pinatas became ballot boxes
that people placed their answers to these questions.
I have three different questions for the three
different pinatas.
And you know, it wasn't about creating solutions, but just
thinking about answers, just thinking
about different ways we can all--
and also just creating opinions and awareness.
So after all was done, we broke the pinatas.
So this is another step of me doing participatory work
as well.
And when the pinatas were broken,
if you go to the next slide, we'd gather around
and we read all of the notes and all the answers
that were provided from those questions.
And it wasn't about us having a long winded conversation.
It was more about us reading those responses,
and meditating on those answers, and they're all different.
So it was like trying to create an argument,
but just so much like, how are we aware of everything.
And yeah, so that was kind of another use
kind of going back to my Chaffey days
too, like of the paper mache, and detailing of tissue paper.
And then for my graduate work, as I moved on
from Cal State Long Beach, started with more performances.
Something I did in my undergrad work,
but I didn't utilize as much.
I was mostly thinking about grief in these moments.
This was on the anniversary of my aunt's death.
So again, going back to that initial installation,
and thinking about the idea of grief, and how it's repetitive,
and how it's everlong, and how it's sometimes unexplainable.
What I set up was myself, I love to do karaoke,
and my aunt was a singer too.
And so what I did was I started off by singing Selena's Como la
Flor.
And then what I did was like for the audio recording that I had,
of this like karaoke kind of staging,
I ended up looping the part where the song goes,
"I, como me duele."
And I did that for three hours, and I
sang that and cried for three hours, in kind of grief.
And so some participants joined me.
Most people just kind of stayed away from it.
And it's part of this larger performance event.
And so it was kind of--
it was easy for me to cry that long, and cry, and just sing,
and cry for that period of time.
But I think that it was also like the anxiety
of being vulnerable in front of people as well.
My next piece for this was also talking
about the border in particular.
So we can play it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So that work was about grief too.
If you could hear it, there was like some singing
in the background, and that was just a recording
that I had of my late cousin who was deported,
and then because he got ill and couldn't work anymore,
and then eventually died on the other side.
And I was the person to tell his family, his children that I
grew up with about his death.
And thinking about grief in the border, and how a lot of us
have been unable to visit the graves of the people
that we lost, and how there's this constant conflict
within it, is what I was meditating on.
Originally, when I was recording this,
I was just documenting myself picking up border dirt.
And I didn't really know what to do with the material.
And then I kind of just realized that--
because I went there frequently.
And this was like within the San Diego area.
This is right next to the shipping parts,
basically the port where goods come in through.
So it's a lot of trucks.
And yeah, I would just go there often and collect dirt.
Because I wasn't sure was going to do with it,
but they wanted to work with it.
And what it ended up being was the action of digging,
the action of even grabbing the dirt became the work itself.
I just tried doing a lot of trial and errors.
I just didn't like anything that I made out of it.
It didn't feel as soothing as much as like the action of it
all.
So it became kind of more performance than anything else.
And then I was thinking about these ideas of language
while I was in grad school as well.
And how it became these--
you know, the way I learned Spanish was through my parents
and through telenovelas.
And I considered that a lot while I was--
and Spanish television, in general,
is how I learned Spanish.
And so I became really interested in that,
while also incorporating these ideas of like,
when I see the combination of both my queer identity
and my Spanish speaking background, my Latinx
background, and that was that these queer night lives.
Specifically, like this was at New Jalisco,
which has a whole bunch of drag performances.
And if we go to the next slide, we can kind of
get a preview of the work.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SPEAKING IN SPANISH]
[NATURE SOUNDS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yeah, so the song is like from a telenovela theme song.
And I was using clips from telenovela too.
So I do a lot of writing as well.
And so just used kind of these texts that
had me thinking about my upbringing of being
a Spanish speaker, and then learning how to lose language
as I entered school.
And also thinking about how I'm trying to still engage
with that as I'm growing as an adult at the same time,
but also as I'm finding other ways of my identity as well.
So I kind of just tackled on that as well.
And then the next slide, I was going
to show video for this one too.
Because what I ended up doing was doing these auditions.
It's like, it was a video, and then after the video was over,
was a performance.
So I had two parts to it.
And the video part was me holding auditions
for this telenovela that I had created,
and asking different performers, actors, to participate
that also came from Spanish speaking backgrounds, or Latinx
backgrounds.
And then reading this fully Spanish script,
some of the folks struggled with that.
Some of them were much better at reading it.
And some of them were great actors,
but could not read Spanish quite well.
But the whole point of the script
was thinking about this high volume of loss,
and also burden of language as well,
as you think about someone that like myself,
who would go to my mother's doctor's appointments
just so I can translate things, or people that
go to Mexico, and like myself, again,
who feel an amount of discomfort of even speaking the language
when I'm there.
So it's like ties both of them together.
And so viewing telenovelas as like high drama settings,
I also kind of considered like what
I learned from telenovelas, and all of them
were just like words of insults.
And so what I ended up doing was having these words of insults
scrolled, I would scream them, and then my partner performer
would slap me across the face as I was screaming them.
So the whole idea of like this [? cachatada ?] is like a slap
to the mouth, to the face, and to the loss of language,
and to also like this burden of language as well.
So it was something I was playing with at the time.
So this closet, again, thinking about queer identity.
This is a collaborative project I did with an artist
friend, Christine Hudson.
And what we were kind of fixated on this idea of the closet,
and this kind of notion of coming out of it,
but also creating this transparency of the closet.
And I think we took a lot of text
from Eve Sedgwick's Invisibility of the Closet, and thinking
about how it's subverted in a lot of ways,
but how can we make a translucent closet.
First of all, that was hard work.
And then also creating ways for it
to be interactive and actually hold space for folks.
So what this became was a clothing collection.
And in the collection, first of all, people
could take clothes if they wanted to.
But they were also available to donate clothes.
And so this became like a project
where people would come in and give clothes.
And what we did with those clothes was eventually
give it to LGBTQ youth that were facing homelessness,
or just struggling for income.
So this became kind of like another way for us
to have participants be included in the piece.
Yeah, and then we go to the next slide.
I think there's another slide, right?
Yes.
Yeah, so obviously, I talk a lot about identity in general.
And I was starting to feel like a little bit of animosity
towards the fact that I had these expectations about me
as an artist, as a Chicanx, Latinx artist that
were placed upon me.
And sometimes, yes, I did work around it,
but I also felt like I was only expected to do work about it.
But I wanted to do it in a way that felt like it
was my identity in particular.
So having that conflict, and also thinking about how am I--
I don't want to be a gatekeeper for this identity.
I don't want to be the only speaker for this identity.
But I also realize that like when
folks were pushing me to do work like that,
it became kind of this like, I felt
like I was exploiting my identity more
than anything else.
So there was a conflict with that.
And I was just looking at materials of the things that
can carry so much.
And so I started making these small gestures
with these bolsas, which are reusable and durable,
and hold groceries, or what have you.
And thinking about myself as that as well.
So yeah, and so I really love the material in general.
So all the bolsas that I was making at that time
stood at my height, and had the potential for me
to be inside of them as well.
So they were designed for me.
So it was just about manipulating
them to be at my height.
That actually, with the use of materials,
brings me to kind of the next project
that I'm currently super focused on, which is 9th to Olympic.
It was part of my thesis, but it's
something that is beyond my thesis as I graduated.
But when I got those bags, I went to the pinata district.
And this was kind of--
I loved going there.
And similarly to like the border project,
I felt like as I was grabbing material,
I was thinking about how the material is just
second to like the space of it all,
and the action of being there.
And so I started to really become friends
and familiar with the area, and the folks that
are working there.
And suddenly, I had just this large interest in them.
And also like thinking about the area
that we currently occupy in that area,
is like is a place that has ownership,
but also the ownership is impermanent.
And I think about how L.A. changes so fast,
and how displacement happens.
But also, like how much I want to be so protective of spaces
like this.
And especially honor things as like someone
that's been working at our institutions
for nearly ten years now, and how
I think about how some of those institutions I worked with
didn't really focus on the community around them.
And for them, they were speaking to the surrounding communities
as much as they were like trying to get the art community here.
But a lot of spaces that I also worked at
were really good about being community based.
And so thinking about larger institutions
that don't really focus in on community,
or are just barely starting to engage with the community.
I also was trying to give notice of like how museums aren't
the only cultural meccas.
They aren't the only places that house culture.
There is culture before them, and there's culture after them.
And it's just about making sure that we protect
these spaces as much as we protect museums and art
institutions.
So to me, like looking at the district
was an art institution.
It was a space that represented so much to me, where
I can see makers, and I could see crafts,
and I could see all this iconography that
so much belonged to my history and my family.
But also to everyone around that was walking around.
So I have like another just image
of that, my failed attempt of trying
to do a panoramic of the other side of the street,
which is a little lonelier.
But like still spirited in a lot of ways.
And my whole point of wanting to be there
was trying to sustain these businesses,
trying to sustain this culture, that these arts
that were happening there.
I still utilized bolsas, the mercado, these market bags.
But I reshaped them to kind of think of people inside of them
more formally.
And so what I thought about was clothing,
and this idea of uniforms, and this idea of laborers,
and how I would love to give them the opportunity
to use these things, or understand these things.
And so I started making these uniforms out of the material
that I once was utilizing for something else.
Also, going back to painting again,
and utilizing the idea of what painting
is, or challenging what it could be.
And a lot of these works were made within conversations
that I was having with the folks there.
So this one's particularly--
it's called the Creciendo.
And it's Creciendo Para Yolanda.
So it was a conversation I had with Yolanda,
who was part of [? La Mecanita. ?]
And how I like had her choose the vase that I was buying,
but also have conversations with her.
She also was from the same state as my parents from Mexico.
And she had just talked to me about her daughter, and all
these things.
So it's just about creating these conversations,
and my responses to those conversations.
And again, like this idea of uniform,
this one was for me, because I love wearing overalls.
And so I was just thinking about how that is my uniform.
It's part of my daily, but also like yeah.
And these were all like things that
could fit a person, particularly me,
because I'm the only person that I can size.
I'm not really a textile maker, or a clothing maker.
These are all like hands stitched too.
So there's also the fragility of that too.
But yeah, so I was using my own body
as a model for these works.
During my time in grad school, which was
I just graduated this past May.
It was during the pandemic.
And that halted everything that I was working on.
And all the stores that were bright, and vibrant,
and colorful, and loud, and really great, were closed down.
And I didn't know what to do.
This was on April 1st.
I had just returned from like this housing protest.
And like I had worked with housing rights communities
as well before.
And so you know, I thought about how the pinata district
is a district of hustler's, of people that
are just trying to survive.
And it's a daily struggle to survive.
And how this impacted them more than maybe a lot
of other folks.
Because you know, it was always on their mind anyways
before the pandemic.
So thinking about how migrant communities choose
to adapt and survive with something that I
was struggling to kind of see within the community.
But within a few months, I did.
It was like a month and a half.
And what they ended up doing was housing essential products,
so that they can be seen as this,
quote unquote, essential business.
So all of them eventually started to open up,
and it was just kind of like thinking fast,
and because they had no other choice but to be open
and to continue.
But what happened was just they lost a lot of business.
And prior, I didn't want to incorporate their labor
into the work that I was doing, because they were already
doing labor on the daily.
So my efforts were just me to have these conversations,
and I would do the labor of creating.
But suddenly, I saw this opportunity of they
didn't have as much business, and I'm
sure that they were struggling to make ends meet.
So I worked with a few folks, and I started
designing ideas of pinatas.
Another thing that I noticed was that a lot of them
didn't have digital presence.
They didn't have online stores.
Some of them didn't even have a Facebook, you know.
So it was just kind of a struggle
for them to try to work within the online platform, when
it wasn't something they ever thought about.
A lot of these spaces were also cash only.
So it's just like, how does that work.
Again, they just started adapting to it.
And part of that adaptation was me promoting all of them
as well.
And so it wasn't just the pinatas,
or the party supplies stores, but also the street vendors,
those interested in it as well.
And so if we to the next slide, that's
when I get to this illustration that I was making.
Sobrevivientes is the first text that I thought about,
or the words I thought about when
I considered this district.
And sobrevivientes means survivors in Spanish.
And I just kind of did this doodle,
and it was like, I think this is something
that I want to actually happen.
I worked with one of the store's name
is Carousel Party Supplies.
And that's Linel, with this fist up,
mask on, right in the middle.
And he's like the head pinata maker there, pinatero.
And yeah, as you can kind of see,
the outside is very important, just as important
as the inside for these folks.
So you can kind of see that there's a wall of mass
that they've created.
All of the stuff right in the front
is all like cleaning supplies, sanitation things,
all kinds of just like-- or even like tissue paper.
And like, I mean like tissues, and toilet paper.
Like, everything that everyone kind of
needed during this time.
So again, they shift gears, but they're still
trying to promote parties and supplies for them.
But yeah, this is them becoming quite proud.
Linel added the coronavirus pinatas
on the ends of each of those.
But you know, so it was important for me
to kind of also create these opportunities for them.
But what also ended up happening was
they ended up having a sense of pride of the work
that they made.
This isn't something that they ever been commissioned to do.
You know, it's just usually characters,
or numbers for people's ages, for children's ages.
So this is a new thing for them.
And yeah, I ended up doing this.
My thesis ended up being a direct--
this is like the thesis installation.
But the whole idea came through in a direct response
to the impact of what the pandemic created,
and the opportunity that I created through that.
And that was to continue this engagement,
but also initiate these collaborative efforts.
And so this was the display that I had.
And of course, no one can actually enter the gallery.
So this display was specifically for the windows,
a drawing for the window, dressed for the window.
So I had the word sobrevivientes.
That one, and juntos, were words I commissioned Carosle Party
Supply for that.
Con ganas, and you can't see it but those are the word, pasale,
were done by [INAUDIBLE] Party Supply.
And then entrale, which is on the other side,
that one was done by this really small store, La
Mexicanita, which is one of my favorite stores there.
I'm just going to look closely tied to them.
But all of them, like, I didn't know [INAUDIBLE] as much,
but we ended up being really good friends.
She's really funny.
So like, I ended up being really good friends
with all these folks there.
And it was just this idea of creating connectivity,
but also, this opportunity for them
to see themselves as makers, just as I see them as well.
You know, my thesis, and my project as it continues,
the whole point of it was to create business
for these spaces so that I can be part of the way
that they sustained.
Like, I go there, and I shop there.
But I can't be the only one.
And I would like to continue to influence folks.
Like, continue to engage, and to create opportunities for them.
And yeah, so the plan initially was
to actually have an exhibition kind of out there.
And but that was again pushed.
But it's something that I continuously think about,
and how I can have participation of the folks there,
or collaboration.
And as I continue with my Instagram page
that I created for the district, which a lot of them
follow me on.
And also, other parties supply stores
that aren't even in that area sort of follow me on there too.
So it just it's this kind of activity
that's constantly happening.
We've created a space online, as well aside from the space
that's created on the street.
And hopefully, to some points, I will put this project
into fruition at a more safer time.
But like, continuously thinking of ways
of how to collaborate with these folks.
Yeah.
I think I'll end there.
Yeah, that's the last slide anyways.
Thank you, Dulce.
It's a real joy to learn about your process,
or about your practice.
So thank you so much.
So we would ask all of you to ask questions.
If you would prefer to not show yourself, or not speak,
you can include your question in the chat,
and Andy and I will ask them.
Or you can unmute yourself and speak, whatever you prefer.
But maybe I'll kick it off with a couple questions.
So it's interesting that so many of the materials that you use,
whether we're talking about pinatas, or mercado bag
garments, or all these different material choices
that you're making, are often traditionally woven
or manufactured by female laborers.
And so I just wanted to ask if that's intentional.
And then sort of a part two is, do you consider
yourself a feminist artist?
Yeah, I mean, feminism is-- come on, you know that.
But yeah, I mean, I think of myself
as an activist in general for all kinds of human rights.
And thinking about my grandfather
was someone on my maternal side, was part of the Pasero Project.
He came over to the states just to be farm work.
And he died quite young due to all the pesticides
he was exposed to.
And labor rights is something that I constantly--
and my whole family is at the forefront of.
My brother was a secretary for his union, in particular.
And so it's encompassed like my whole family's lifestyle,
thinking about that, and thinking about lower income,
thinking about women laborers, migrants in general.
Just where we see kind of the injustice disenfranchisement
of certain folks is usually where I find my narratives
to be surrounding anyways.
So yes, constant use of activism in my work in some sort of way,
whether it be through like just creating dialogue,
or actually creating action.
I see your other question too about the commission.
So the question is, did I commission multiple pinata
vendors as a way of supporting?
Yes, that's exactly what I did.
Some of them don't make pinatas.
Some of them are imported.
And which is also really nice, because it's
this constant conversation with the border that they have,
right.
So it's like they're made from Mexico,
and they bring them over here.
So was one thing was like trying to find
the folks that were actually making them live, and were
interested in making them, or have the time,
or the means to make them.
Means meaning like even space, because some of the stores
were smaller than others.
So also thinking about that as well.
Yeah, but even so, even if I'm not commissioning pinatas,
I will go to as many stores, as many people as possible.
And at the time where things were a little safer,
and I would bring folks there, I would
do kind of like these walks with people.
And I would always ask them to bring cash with them.
And so like, we'd walk around and we'd
go into different stores.
And even when we ate, I didn't have
people choose the same street vendors
to eat to buy food from.
So it'd be like we disperse our moneys to as many people
as we possibly could.
Yeah, that's amazing.
So I'm realizing, we are almost four o'clock.
Last call for a question from participants.
Oh, Madeline.
Hi, guys Hi, everyone.
I don't have any questions, but I just
wanted to say congratulations on everything,
graduating, but continuing your amazing work.
And I had to chime in and hear what's going on.
And I'm really looking forward to seeing all
that you create in the future.
Aw, Maddy, how nice.
I hope you're well.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
We'll be in touch.
Yes.
Bye.
Maybe this would be a quick wrap up question.
Evelyn asks, how do you keep your motivation
to continue creating.
And I would also tack on particularly
during this pandemic.
I mean, it's hard.
Motivation is not something that everyone has right now.
And you know, I have my days where I don't really
want to do anything.
But I think that everything has been a continuous struggle.
And even through this time, like we've seen so many mutual aid
opportunities, and crowdfunding opportunities,
where the community just helps itself,
like when our government is kind of low on helping us.
So that's probably the most motivating thing that I have,
is other folks that I see continuously
doing these things as well.
And this is my particular project,
but it's also not the only place that I stay focused in.
But those kinds of moments keep me
motivated to continue to do the work.
Well, huge thanks to you, Dulce.
Thanks for your generosity and time today.
And I want to thank all of you for being here and joining us
this afternoon, and carving out some time in your day.
We appreciate you.
Roman is going to put a link to a very quick survey we'd
ask all of you to complete.
Take a moment to do so.
We'd greatly appreciate if you could.
And also just to reiterate what Roman said earlier,
that archived episodes will be included on our website
as soon as they're available.
So thanks again, everyone.
And take good care.
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