Join LACE for the opening celebration of A Tender Excavation at Cal State University, Los Angeles’ Luckman Gallery. Light refreshments will be provided.

A Tender Excavation approaches research-based artistic practices through propositions of alternative histories, bringing together a group of artists that work with historical and familial photographic archives as a point of departure to construct new narratives and elicit transformation. Artists featured in the exhibition include Zeynep Abes, Susu Attar, Jamil Baldwin, Mely Barragán, Artemisa Clark, Arleene Correa Valencia, Mercedes Dorame, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Leah King, Tarrah Krajnak, Heesoo Kwon, Ann Le, Arlene Mejorado, Star Montana and Camille Wong.

The title of the exhibition borrows a description of Arlene Mejorado’s practice as “an act of care, via a tender excavation of objects, anecdotes, and memories simultaneously.” A Tender Excavation centers identities that have been systematically excluded from mainstream narratives and representations of not only American art but of representing an “American” identity. A Tender Excavation features mainly US-based artists who represent Afro-Latinx, African American, Chinese American, Gabrielino/Tongva Nation, Korean American, Iraqi American, Latinx, Mexican, Mexican American, Peruvian American, Thai, Turkish American and Vietnamese American intersecting identities, among others. For these artists, whose backgrounds are connected to diasporic experiences of discrimination, displacement, erasure, exclusion, slavery and systemic violence, the practice of piecing together history through memory and counter-narrative is an act of transformation and healing. The works selected for the exhibition depart from personal, familial, or historical photographic archives which ultimately are recontextualized through installation, collage, painting, film, video, sculpture, or mixed media, reimagining and reconnecting lost fragments to speak about personal and collective resilience, constructing new possibilities for an interconnected futurity.

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