Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living

Guadalupe Rosales's practice is rooted in the preservation of cultural memory, and she preserves archives, records, and projects that bear witness to the breadth of Los Angeles culture. As part of an ongoing digital project, Rosales has created two publicly accessible archives on Instagram, @veteranas_and_rucas and @map_pointz. Drawn from images contributed by people throughout Los Angeles and beyond, these accounts feature family photographs, pictures of social gatherings, and ephemera from raves and parties. Rosales builds these personal and subcultural artifacts into a powerful portrait of community, bringing personal and collective histories into the present.

Hybridity is an important concept for her practice, both as a way of thinking about the complexities of identity and as an acknowledgment of the different meanings that can be contained in singular objects, artworks, and spaces. This is reflected in the way she transforms existing materials and symbols, opening up seemingly familiar things to allow for new interpretations. Through these objects, Rosales destabilizes fixed ideas of culture and gives voice to the intimacies of queer and familial lived experience, allowing ancestral knowledge, personal memory, and contemporary existence to sit side by side. 

At the Edge of the Sun

At the Edge of the Sun is organized by an intimate constellation of twelve artists who have connected over the past decade through artistic discourse and shared experiences of living in Los Angeles. The exhibit convenes works informed by underground economies, California landscapes, night life, local histories, systemic architecture, surveillance, youth culture, public transportation, backyard kickbacks and more. At the Edge of the Sun collectivizes a nod to personal contexts and the artists’ sense of time and place, turning away from familiar mainstream stereotypes of Los Angeles in favor of embracing their own landmarks, memories, communities and visions of their city.

Though vast and diverse in their creative queries, the artists share a fusion of vernacular and industrial techniques with installation, painting, photographic and sculptural practices and are active in incorporating inherited skills, trades and practices that include, hand sign painting, car customization, truck detailing, adobe construction and small-scale ceramics. Introducing these modes of making within their practices allows them to pay homage to and build on the legacies of generations of artists that have been generative in and expanding the bounds of cultural production.

In the last year, the artists have met regularly to discuss and plan how to shape an exhibition that could reflect not only their individual practices, but make visible connecting threads by harnessing moments of convergence that elucidate a history of collaboration, support and camaraderie amongst the group. In addition to the exhibition, the artists have sought out peers that include designers, filmmakers, writers and photographers that will contribute to the expansion of the show beyond the gallery walls. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book with an introductory essay by Dr. Rose Salseda featuring interviews and photos with the artists.

The artists participating in the exhibition are:

Diana Yesenia Alvarado
Michael Alvarez
Mario Ayala
Karla Ekaterine Canseco
rafa esparza
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.
Ozzie Juarez
Maria Maea
Jaime Muñoz
Guadalupe Rosales
Gabriela Ruiz
Shizu Saldamando

Read the Los Angeles Times article Being in community is a choice. And these L.A. artists keep picking each other here.

WACHA: viajes transtemporales

Guadalupe Rosales, rafa esparza

February 6th–March 30th, 2024

Press Release

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept

Guadalupe Rosales has an abiding commitment to depicting and documenting her home, East Los Angeles, and the Latinx communities of Southern California. As she has written: “I have been photographing sites primarily in East LA, where I spent most of my teenage years—my neighborhood, the home I grew up in, Whittier Boulevard, alleyways—and the site where the lives of loved ones have been lost. These photographs hold the essence of my own memories here with my friends and family—intimate, warm, haunting and inviting. Most of them were taken while the majority of the city slept. There is an abstract quality of night that is potent with dreams and escape and journey that answers to my desire to not capture the literal events—many violent—of growing up in East LA. The night is where we could feel the complexity of being both free and chased. In this way, nights in East Los Angeles had its own reality. A surreality. Like a waking dream. This work is also about honoring the dead and the living. The process of photographing these locations has not always been easy: It can trigger traumatic memories to surface. But the work guides me through difficult questions that bring me better understandings of my past and my present, as well as offering new revelations.”

Guadalupe Rosales: Drifting on A Memory

December 10, 2021 to July 10, 2022 | Concourse

Drifting on a Memory, Rosales collaborated with Dallas-based lowrider artist Lokey Calderon to create an immersive work that nods to lowrider culture and uses sound to replicate the aural experience of cruising in East LA.

With origins in Los Angeles in the mid-20th century, lowriders—customized cars that often feature intricate designs, opulent interiors, and glittering finishes—have become a prominent expression of Mexican American culture throughout the United States. The rich colors and finely detailed designs spanning the 153-foot walls of the Museum’s Concourse evoke the iridescent surfaces of lowrider cars on a monumental scale. In orchestrating this sensorial space, Rosales activates memories and invites viewers to collectively share in the experience.

dma.org/art/exhibitions/guadalupe-rosales-drifting-memory

Group Exhibition:

Sweat

6.11.21 — 1.9.22

Curated by Anna Schneider, Raphael Fonseca
Curatorial assistance: Elena Setzer

Description: The group exhibition “Sweat” is the result of two years of intensive research. The show is dedicated to the phenomenon of bodies that act together and shape their present. Breaking a sweat in the face of violent attempts to control the human body represents an artistic strategy of resistance. 

If we are witnessing the global scale of systemic injustice at an unprecedented scale, we are also assisting to the impressive growth of alliances of transnational resistance movements. The group exhibition “Sweat” brings together more than twenty artistic voices that respond to several conditions of political pressure. The artistic positions range from present-day to pioneering works from the 1970s and ‘80s that mobilised feminist and postcolonial movements in art and society, opening up historical perspectives on artistic languages that are embedded in forms of radical social emancipation. 

“Sweat” is traversed by unique poetics of pleasure and polyphony that counter politics of enmity and exclusion through the creation of sensual acts of self-determination and the materialization of stories that have hitherto been silenced and rendered invisible. 
The artists make use of dynamic media such as dance, film, and video that attest to ephemeral civil choreographies and activate collaborative and archival processes, building on communities and their cultures. Through practices of non-hierarchical recycling, collaging, and sampling of collective and personal imagery, they postulate worlds as vital assemblages of multiple cultural influences and temporalities, disrupting biased mainstream narratives and representations.

With: Pacita Abad (*1946 Philippines, † 2004 Singapore),
Mohamed Bourouissa (*1978 Algeria),
Cecilia Bengolea (*1979, Argentinia)
chameckilerner (*1964 / *1966 Brazil),
Mary Beth Edelson (*1933 USA, † 2004 USA), 
Philipp Gufler (*1989 Germany),
Sunil Gupta (*1953, India),
Eisa Jocson (*1986 Philippines),
Isaac Julien (*1960 UK),
Christine Sun Kim (*1980 USA),
Natalia LL (* 1937 Poland),
Daniel Lind-Ramos (*1953 Puerto Rico),
MAHKU (Movement of Huni Kuin Artists) (*2011 Brazil),
Mulambö (*1995 Brazil),
António Ole (*1951 Angola),
Santiago Reyes (*1971 Ecuador),
Tabita Rezaire (*1989 France),
Michele Rizzo (*1984, Italy)
Guadalupe Rosales (*1980 USA),
Jacolby Satterwhite (*1986 USA),
Tschabalala Self (*1990 USA),
Tuesday Smillie (*1981 USA), 
João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira (*1976 / *1973 Portugal),
Kaylene Whiskey (*1976 Australia),
Zadie Xa (*1983 Canada) & Benito Mayor Vallejo (*1981, Spain)  

Endless Nights

Material Art Fair, Mexico City 2020

Endless Nights

Mirror, Tinted glass (green and grey tint) and moms cassette tapes Dulce Heridas y Pimpinela

46 x 39 cm

El Rocío Sobre Las Madrugadas Sin Fin

Museo Universitario Del Chopo (Chopo University Museum) Mexico City

El Rocío Sobre Las Madrugadas Sin Fin (2020)

Solo Exhibition at Museo Universitario Del Chopo (Chopo University Museum) Mexico City

Este proyecto está dedicado a los marginados. Se trata de desaprender. Aprender de manera distinta esa otra realidad de la cultura mexicana americana del Este de Los Ángeles, California, principalmente durante la década de los noventa. El mundo de Guadalupe Rosales fue un mundo entre muchos mundos. Sus proyectos de archivo Veteranas & Rucas y Map Pointz contienen modos de auto-representación y visibilización: la dicotomía entre lo bueno y lo malo/feo. Como un tributo para quienes murieron por la violencia, el conjunto de fotografías, flyers, reliquias y documentos encara el luto, el trauma y la nostalgia de los que quedaron atrás. Lo que sucede en la noche cuando la mayoría duerme. 

Hasta el 26 de abril 2020

Link to Museo Del Chopo

Group Exhibition: Always, Already, Haunting, “disss-co,” Haunt

The Kitchen, New York, New York, USA

Curated through the Whitney Independent Study Program

May 24- June 15, 2019

In 2019, against a backdrop of cultural institutions that are ever more eager to represent certain types of “fugitive” bodies, Always, Already, Haunting, “disss-co,” Haunt proposes haunting as a representational illogic, an embodied and affective practice that rejects the production of convenient or easily read narratives. Haunting aims to redress the historical violences, absences, and omissions laden in the trappings of institutional “diversity.” Instead, this exhibition foregrounds the social worlds that surround and orbit art institutions—the club, the park, the cruising space, the archive, and the cemetery—lingering on the desires, pleasures, and mournings entangled within them.

Collaborating with dancer Mariana Valencia and DJ Jazmin Romero, Guadalupe Rosales created her first performance activation for the opening of Always, Already, Haunting, “disss-co,” Haunt at The Kitchen in New York.

The exhibition features works by Julie Dash, Minnie Evans, Félix González Torres, Green-Wood Cemetery, shawné michaelain holloway, Nina Howell Starr, Asif Mian, Guadalupe Rosales, Mariana Valencia, Julie Tolentino, The Whitney Archives, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

The Kitchen, New York, New York, USA

Curated through the Whitney Independent Study Program

Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory

Aperture Foundation

Sept. 20, 2018 - Oct. 20, 2018 at Aperture Gallery

Rosales views her work as a way of decriminalizing and reframing the history of brown youth, as well as connecting and reconstituting community. “I was always attracted to photographs not just for their images, but also for the notes written on the back. They were like relics; they reconnected me.” For this exhibition, which extends from a feature in Aperture’s Fall 2018 issue, “Los Angeles,” Rosales presents an installation of materials from her archives—from photobooth images of couples to young Chicanx women posing with cars to the party crews that ran East LA’s underground music scene in the 1990s.

Echoes of a Collective Memory

Vincent Price Museum

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.

Link to exhibition

Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly is curated by Risa Puleo, 2017 Bemis Center Curator-in-Residence.

December 7, 2017–February 24, 2018

Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly takes the migration path of the Monarch butterfly, as a geographic range and a metaphor. The butterfly crosses the border of the United States at its junctions with Canada at the north and Mexico in the south along the entire length of both of these conceptual divides. Bypassing the hotter, desert regions of the country, Monarchs flock along its western and eastern coastal edges, but the busiest path of the orange-and-black butterfly is through the center of the United States. The Monarch travels through Midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, across the Great Plains of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, onwards through the Texas Hill Country all the way to the state of Michoacan in Mexico. The path of the butterfly also connects the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline where it crosses the Missouri River at the border of the Standing Rock nation to the U.S.-Mexico border, but the butterfly itself is indifferent to these artificial borders and conceptual divisions

Endless Nights

Commonwealth and Council

Commonwealth and Council

January 20—March 3, 2018

Reception: Saturday, January 20, 5–8PM
Location: 3006 W 7TH ST STE 220 Los Angeles CA 90005
Exhibition Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6PM and by appointment

“Endless Nights” is a collaboration between Rosales and Eddie Ruvalcaba, who sent in photographs for the archives. When they met, Ruvalcaba surprised her with his own trove of photographs, and mentioned the existence of other damaged photographs and negatives. Ruvalcaba’s photography stood out to Rosales from his first submission because his photos captured the essence of what Rosales herself had observed and experienced as a teenager.This installation attempts to embody this inherently ephemeral essence, materializing the collective memories of vulnerable communities to explore how impermanence might be assuaged through objects. Most of the objects in Rosales’s collection have been rescued, like Ruvalcaba’s photographs, from secret stashes in basements or garages where they were hidden over the years—from parents, from lovers, and ultimately from children. “They were just collecting dust,” people will often tell Rosales as she gratefully receives their donations. In time, we lose people, objects, and the clarity of certain memories—and yet a salvaged object becomes a receptacle for the memories and emotions attached to it. The conversations and immaterial richness begun with Veteranas and Rucas and Map Pointz are brought back to material representation; the party crew hats, flyers, newspaper clippings, and Street Beat magazines are the remaining, potent connections to the people and the moment that were lost. “Now the only thing we have is the material. With my cousin, now I just have his backpack and his photo, but these are things that represent a part of him. [These objects] are as close as I’ll ever be to him. And that’s why this material [I’ve collected and people have donated] is so important because this is as close as we will ever be to that time.” Rosales and Ruvalcaba invite others to continue to help them bring this time closer by adding their own photos and ephemera to the visual conversation. Donations have already been made by people like Theresa Vega, who designed many party and rave flyers in the 1990s. Part altar, part collaborative installation, this work invites those who lived through this time to make new additions. Lived experiences become documentation and ephemera, which in turn become archive and history.

Group Exhibition: PST/CST 太平洋标准时间/中国标准时间 @BANK

Exhibition features works by Beatriz Cortez , Carmen Argote , Carolina Caycedo , Clarissa Tossin , Gala Porras-Kim and Guadalupe Rosales.

Dec 9, 2017 - Jan 20, 2018

Link to Exhibition

Los Angeles, a Spanish name that translates as “the angels,” is the largest city in the Pacific Standard Time (PST) zone. It is sixteen hours behind China Standard Time (CST) in the winter and fifteen hours in the summer. Originally part of Mexico until 1850, the city today is home to a population of ten million. Nearly 40% were born outside the U.S., with the majority coming from Mexico, El Salvador, and China. After Donald Trump took the office last year, immigration was given an unprecedented spotlight with the tradition of multiculturalism in LA suddenly threatened. Against this backdrop, the Getty Foundation initiated Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (PST:LA/LA), an exhibition program exploring the rich past and the vital present of Latin American and Latino art, covering 70 institutions throughout Southern California.

In celebration of this epic initiative, we invite six Los Angeles-based artists, participating in PST: LA/LA, whose families originate from Mexico, Central America, and South America to exhibit in Shanghai for the first time. Their practices unfold in the context of conflictual encounters with the Occidental academy, metropolitan culture, geographic displacement, and the often fallacious construct of Latin American or Latino identity found in their adopted home of LA. Anchored in their personal experiences as immigrants, and the collective psyche of diaspora, the artists work across a wide range of media and strategies to subvert institutional discourses, challenge consumer-capitalist logic, reframe marginalized narratives, and empower themselves through self-representation.

The multi-faceted works included in the exhibition present alternative realities integral to the landscape of Los Angeles’s contemporary art scene. While the artists remain in strong solidarity with their own communities, whether Chicanx neighborhoods in East Los Angelesor towns along Sogamoso River in Colombia, their works invite an open engagement with the audiences in China to call for what Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe suggest “a critical re-evaluation of the ideas on which our mutually entangled future rests in the surging course of globalization, destabilization, and transition.”

First Friday: Lowrider Picnic

Philbrook Museum, Tulsa Oklahoma

The Weekend Starts Here!

With Philbrook Fridays, your weekend starts at the Museum. Kicking off each month with the First Friday Art Crawl at Philbrook Downtown, and continuing each week with special guests, talks, cocktails, food from La Villa Restaurant, live music, and year-round films in the Philbrook Gardens (fourth Friday), there’s always something fun and compelling happening on Friday night.
Launching September 1, 2017.
Every Friday. 6-9pm.

Friday, Sep 1 - Don’t miss a FREE evening of food, friends, and family.
Free and open to all.

You bring the food, blankets, and chairs. We'll bring the fun. Check out some of the coolest lowriders from around the region, eat on the Philbrook lawn, play games, enjoy music from DJ Werewolf, and much more.

Visit a member of Philbrook's Guest Experience Team at the front desk or call us at (918) 748-5300 for more information.

Presented in partnership with acclaimed artist Guadalupe Rosales and Goodtimes Car Club, and made possible with support from the Flint Family Foundation.

LACMA Names Guadalupe Rosales as Its First-Ever Instagram Artist in Residence

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced that Los Angeles–based artist and archivist Guadalupe Rosales was selected as its first-ever Instagram artist in residence.

Rosales started Veteranas and Rucas (@veteranas_and_rucas) and Map Pointz (@map-pointz), both digital archives found on Instagram. She is working on an ongoing project of developing an archive of photographs, objects, and ephemera related to the 1990s Los Angeles Latinx party scene. Rosales has lectured at various institutions, including UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, the New Museum, the Vincent Price Art Museum, New York University, and the Graduate Center in New York, among others.

Rita Gonzalez, curator and acting head of contemporary art at LACMA, said, “What struck us about Rosales’s approach is her use of Instagram in an expanded sense. She thinks about the platform in the way that curators and artists use research to approach their work, and highlights the different ways of telling stories visually, drawing out people’s experiences in a narrative way.”

Rosales said that she will use LACMA’s Instagram to connect with people about art in Los Angeles. “I want to have conversations about art with people from different backgrounds, and Instagram is an ideal place for that,” she said. “It’s where we will all intersect and have dialogue around artworks inside and outside of museums.”

According to the artist, LACMA director Michael Govan first discovered Rosales’s work at an exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, which led to brainstorming about how to use LACMA’s social media platforms for artists. “The piece I had in the exhibition was a silent video of screen grabs from Veteranas and Rucas,” Rosales said. “There were about fifty images looping. Each image stayed up for about one minute, long enough for the viewer to read the comments below the images. I added the comment sections as a way to give voice or humanize the photographs because I wanted the audience to understand that people’s stories and photos are important and I wanted to honor that.”

Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943-2016

Running Dates: October 15, 2016 - February 25, 2017

Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943 – 2016 is a multimedia exhibition that traverses eight decades of style, art, and music, and presents vignettes that consider youth culture as a social class, distinct issues associated with young people, principles of social organization, and the emergence of subcultural groups. Citing the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots as a seminal moment in the history of Los Angeles youth culture, the exhibition emphasizes a recirculation of shared experiences across time, reflecting recurrent and ongoing struggles and triumphs.

From the G.I. generation to the Millennials, young people from Los Angeles have shaped their identities through aesthetics, ideologies, and diverse forms of expression. The exhibition is not a historical overview, but is instead a presentation of kaleidoscopic group experiences and subcultural genres, emphasizing the creativity, inventiveness and diversity characterizing the World War II/post-war period to the present. Often considered to be outside of mainstream narratives and visual identities, youth culture in Los Angeles intersects with important social movements and countercultural discourse in the post-war era.

Thematic sections include: a look at connections between Los Angeles and British youth cultures and the dialog between the two; pachuco and pachuca culture; criminalization of youth from World War II to the present; generations of youth resistance; the collapse of musical genres with social identities and street fashion; the emergence of social spaces; and a speculative future of tomorrow’s youth. The exhibition includes drawing, installation, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture, as well as elements from mass media such as television footage, print media, documentary photography, social media, and ephemera. Additionally, it features an installation of pachuco-era men and women’s fashion, and a digital music platform.

Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943 - 2016 is organized by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, with collaboration from John Carlos de Luna (Barrio Dandy), Lysa Flores, Carribean Fragoza, Ruben Guevara, Colin Gunckel, Romeo Guzman, Jorge Leal, Vincent Ramos, Adrian Rivas, Laleña Vellanoweth, and Mario Ybarra, Jr. The exhibition includes more than thirty-five artists: Richard E. Aaron, Asco, Adriana and Ben Avila, Judy Baca, Janette Beckman, Chaz Bojorquez, Gregory Bojorquez, Juan Capistran, Rafael Cardenas, Carolyn Castaño, Oscar Castillo, Gusmano Cesaretti, Sandra de la Loza, John Carlos de Luna (Barrio Dandy), Dino Dinco, Alex Donis, Richard Duardo, Harry Gamboa Jr., Ignacio Gomez, Willie Herrón III, Salomón Huerta, Patrick Martinez, Jose Montoya, Timothy Norris, Felix Quintana, Vincent Ramos, Guadalupe Rosales, Shizu Saldamando, Humberto Sandoval, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, Vincent Valdez, Ricardo Valverde, Mario Ybarra Jr. and others. Additional contributors include Carmelo Alvarez, Mike Avelar, Yolanda Comparán Ferrer, Art Laboe, and Sabby Rayas.

On Ishton's Porch Group Show

Curated by Spanto and Nick Angelo

Nick Angelo / Greg Bojorquez / Valerie J. Bower / Josh Bagel Klassman / Sean Maung / Matt McCormick / Estevan Oriol / Dan Regan / Guadalupe Rosales / Spanto / Darryl Westley / Jordan Doner

“Gentrification is a term loaded with diverse perspectives and deeply personal effects. On Ishton’s Porch is a conversation among artists and how their material practices reveal direct and sensitive relationships to gentrification.
In the continual process of gentrification, the city of Los Angeles faces the erasure of its rich histories. Guadalupe Rosales, in collaboration with Spanto, suspends time and complicates the idea of home in the re-creation of an archetypical 90s teenager’s bedroom filled with memories, feelings of loss and the displacement of identity when the narratives of neighborhoods are rewritten. Indexical maps by Nick Angelo navigate personal reflections on the multitudinous transformations of Los Angeles. The collective works presence the past and display the instability of self in an unstable urban environment. The show makes clear the pertinence of perpetual examination of gentrification in order to preserve intersections of personal and spatial histories.
On Ishton’s Porch is a nostalgic palimpsest of the process of gentrification. The artworks in the show go beyond observation to activate awareness of the social, economic, and psychic effects of gentrification. Through a range of perspectives there emerges a dialogic co-history, promoting new insights into gentrifying, lived sites today.”