ARTIST BIOS

Laura Aguilar was an American photographer (1959-2018). Aguilar, of native Californio, Mexican and Irish descent, was born in San Gabriel, California and grew up in the San Gabriel valley. After studying photography at East Los Angeles College, her photographic production was characterized by portraits of diverse communities in the Los Angeles area, self-portraits, and later, nude self-portraits in nature. Ahead of her time, Aguilar’s late 20th century and early millennium photography first expose the visibility of underrepresented and marginalized women and communities, then celebrate them.

Indira Allegra is a conceptual artist and founder of Cazimi Studio. Cazimi Studio uses weaving as a framework to creatively transform tension within different sites. The studio is unique in its emphasis on performance, publication and the integration of spiritual care as preferred design solutions. Thinking as a poet, threads of connection are discovered between seemingly disparate experiences. Moving as a weaver, these connections are interlaced into a greater whole. Allegra's work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, SF Chronicle, e-flux, All Arts and ARTFORUM and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Blaffer Museum (Houston, TX), Center for Craft Creativity and Design (Asheville, NC); John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI); Gray Area (San Francisco, CA); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA) and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, CA) among others. 

Allegra is the author of Tension Studies and Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness (Sming Sming Books). Their writing has been featured in Theater, TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, American Craft Magazine, Panorama Journal, Leonardo and Material Intelligence among others. Their monograph Blackout (Sming Sming Books) is in the collection of major art museum libraries nationwide. Allegra has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Burke Prize, Creative Capital, United States Artists Fellowship, Gerbode Choreographer Award, Art Matters Fellowship and CripTech Metaverse Fellowship. cazimistudio.space | @indiraallegrastudio

Irma Yuliana Barbosa is a multimedia artist born and raised in Los Angeles. Yuli makes precarious installations that incorporate projections, photographs, sculpture, and performance. Through their practice they navigate liminal space in relation to identity making, border consciousness, and rasquachismo. Exploring themes of heritage, folklore, yearning, and sexuality they are inspired by the malleability of transgenerational memory. They are committed to translating material memory through processes of care, preservation, and transformation. Yuli is currently living and working in the East Bay and an MFA Candidate at UC Berkeley.  @irmayulianabarbosa

Tamara Blackshear is an artist working at The Arc-Solano, a center for adults with developmental differences in Vallejo, CA.

Liz Hernández (b. 1993, Mexico City, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction through painting, sculpture, embroidery, and writing. Deeply influenced by Mexican craft techniques, her work explores the rich language of materials, drawing inspiration from literature, anthropology, syncretism, and cultural traditions. Hernández has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is part of the permanent collections at KADIST (SF), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the de Young Museum.

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects. Ibarra’s work has been featured at The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), ONE Archives (LA) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few.  She is currently a UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Eureka Fellow. She has received the Creative Capital Award, the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, the Art Matters Grant, the Eisner Film and Video Prize, the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award among others. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, ArtNews and in various academic journals and books nationally and internationally. 

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE! and Survived and Punished, both national feminist of color organizations dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, Art Practice/Studio and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses at various Universities. Past adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: Stanford University, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts.  Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and attended the Post Colonial Studies program held at the Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cathy Lu (b. 1984, Miami, FL) creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work. Lu received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA & BFA from Tufts University. She has participated in artist-in-residence programs at the John Michael Kholer Arts Center, Root Division, Bemis Center for the Arts, Recology San Francisco, and the Archie Bray Foundation among others. Her work has been exhibited at Berkeley Art Center; SF MoMA; Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco; A-B Projects, Los Angeles; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; and Marin MoCA. She was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow and a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner. Her work is in the collections of SF MoMA, KADIST, ICA Miami, and The Bunker Art Space. She is currently working on a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Crocker Art Center in Sacramento, CA.

Ana Mendieta was an interdisciplinary artist, referring to herself as a sculptor. She is best known for her earth/body works, most specifically her now iconic Silueta Series, in which she used her body, and later the absence of the body, in the landscape as a way of connecting with nature and the universe. Spanning a period of 15 years, Mendieta created groundbreaking work in sculpture, photography, film, drawing and site-specific installations using organic materials such as earth, water and fire. Her pioneering works are in more than 120 public collections worldwide and continues to be influential today. Ana Mendieta’s innovative work has been the subject of 56 monographic exhibitions, which includes 16 major museum retrospectives. She was born in Havana, Cuba in 1946 and died in New York City in 1985.

Nasim Moghadam is an art educator and a multidisciplinary visual artist holding an MFA in studio art and a BFA in graphic design. Her installations focus on discrimination and hyphenated identity, and the constraints on women, their bodies, and their voices. Using sound, video, photography, and multimedia sculptures of varying scales, and materials that serve as constant physical reminders of femininity, Moghadam creates narratives inspired by the efforts of women worldwide who are defending their basic, unalienable rights. Envisioning another world, an equal world in solidarity, Moghadam celebrates how womxn go beyond cultural and political limitations, rise up, and create a revolution.

Moghadam has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, H. A. R. D. Foundation, Outstanding Graduate Award from SFAI, along with residencies at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program, Kala Art Institute, and Building 180. Her works have been published and featured in international festivals including Italy and Japan, and national museums and galleries, such as SFMOMA, San Francisco Art Commission, Museum of Craft and Design, Southern Exposure, Minnesota Street Project, Aggregate Space Gallery, Root Division, Kala Art, O’Hanlon Center, etc. Nasim is also an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts and Foothill college.

Jaklin Romine was born in Burbank, California, and currently lives in Pasadena. She lived in East LA [El Sereno] for 15 years, before that she lived in Echo Park, and grew up in Alhambra/San Gabriel. She studied Studio Arts at Cal State LA, and got her Masters of Fine Art at CalArts . Romine has been working professionally since 2015 and has been exhibiting in multiple group exhibitions across Los Angeles at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, NAVEL, Noysky Projects, Superstition Gallery, One Archives, Night Gallery, Dominique Gallery, Avenue 50 Studio, Gallery 825, Eastside Cafe, Luckman Fine Arts Gallery and in New York at Flux Factory, Gibney Studios, New Women Space. She has lectured on her work at UCLA, NY Film Academy, Chapman University, SCRIPTS College, Torrance Art Museum, Cal Arts, as part of the ArtChangeUS: Arts in a Changing America five year initiative. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Curate LA, KCET, on the cover, centerfold, and contributor of Full Blede and X-TRA. In 2019 she won the Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Grant which assisted her in creating her first solo show, Why Bring Me Flowers When I’m Dead ? When You Had The Time To Do It When I Was Alive/Living With SCI, PSLA, Los Angeles, CA. Then the work from her solo show was curated into group shows at The Wignall Museum, Consulado General de Mexico, SUR Biennial at Rio Hondo College. Simultaneously, Jaklin created a zine from her photographic work and traveled to the Shanghai Art Book Fair, Independent Art Book Fair in LA & NY, Long Beach Zine Fest, San Diego Zine Fest, San Francisco Zine Fest, and Los Angeles Zine Fest. Currently she is working on new photographic and installation work with artist Ginger Quintanilla. (Ginger Q)

Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Hannah Butter in 1940, in New York. She attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1956 to 1961, graduating with a BFA and a teaching certificate. Although she is best known as a feminist artist, she was also a teacher for approximately 30 years. From the year of her graduation from Temple University until 1970, she taught art at two high schools, one in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania (1961–65), and the other in White Plains, New York (1965–70), and between the years 1972 and 1991, she taught sculpture at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Wilke used the various mediums of photography, performance, sculpture, and video to examine and challenge prevailing notions of femininity, feminism, and sexuality. She was one of the first artists to use vaginal imagery in her work with the purpose of directly engaging with feminist issues. During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Wilke worked on creating a type of female iconography based on the body, constructing abstract, organic forms that closely resembled female genitalia. She displayed these forms on the floor or wall in a highly organized and repetitious manner that recalled Minimalism. During the 1970s, she began to use her own body for performance pieces that she called her "performalist self-portraits." These performances, immortalized on video or in photographs, confront erotic stereotypes by calling attention to and making ironic the conventional gestures, poses, and attributes of the female body. In one well-known piece, the S.O S. Starification Object Series (1974–79), Wilke posed half-naked for a series of black-and-white photo stills, adopting the accoutrements and attitudes of female celebrities, but with her torso literally "scarred" with chewing gum shaped into tiny vulvas. The chewing gum interrupts the viewer's desiring gaze, calling attention to the objectification of woman's bodies.

Wilke received several major grants, including ones from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1982), and Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1987, 1992). She exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad during her lifetime, and though considered somewhat controversial for the use of her own (generally considered) attractive body in works meant to challenge traditional notions of feminine desirability, continues to figure centrally in accounts of feminist art history. Her works have appeared in numerous exhibitions at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York (starting in 1972 and continuing on to the present), and in shows at the Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C. (1979), and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2002). Her work was also included in a major exhibition of feminist art, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, New York; and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2007–09) Recently, Wilke's work figured in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York (2010–11). In the late 1980s Wilke was diagnosed with cancer and struggled with the illness for the last years of her life. Shortly before she died, she photographed herself naked in the hospital, her emaciated body connected to an intravenous drip and her head bald from her treatments. These large, color photographs were Wilke's last testament to the art world before she died on January 28, 1993, in Houston, Texas.

Sandie (Chun-shan) Yi is an assistant professor in the art therapy and counseling department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is a disabled artist and disability culture worker whose work focuses on unconventional wearable objects and explores the desire and intimacy shared by the disabled bodymind. Her work addresses the impact of ethical and medical decisions made about the body and the boundary between ethics and aesthetics. Yi’s art, Crip Couture, calls for a recognition of disability as an aesthetic choice and suggests a new genre of wearable art called “crip fashion.” Crip Couture is Yi’s efforts and practice for cultivating care relationships and helping relationships. The latest rendition of Crip Couture researches and archives disability narratives by collecting bodily artifacts, including skin flakes and hair. Crip Couture aims to preserve disability culture and narratives as heritage. Yi has a PhD in disability studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a master of arts in art therapy from SAIC, and a master of fine arts from University of California, Berkeley. Yi’s academic research interests include disability arts and culture, access pedagogy, disability fashion, and disability culture-informed art therapy. In addition, she is in charge of the Disability Culture Activism Lab, a partnering project with Access Living, the independent living center in Chicago.