Tlali Nantli:
Conexiones con la tierra
May 6-May 29, 2022
Centro Cultural de la Raza
Footage of Tlali Nantli: Conexiones con la tierra’s opening reception on May 6, 2022 at Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, San Diego, CA.
Videography by Evan Apodaca
Animation and edits by John Jairo Valencia
Opening drawing by Suzy Hernandez
The relationship to land has been one of the most important connections that peoples across the world have upheld since the beginning of time. However, that connection was attempted to be disrupted due to the commodification of land enacted throughout the world by European forces. Today, systems of neo-colonialism continue to enact policies to eradicate the sacred relationships that people hold to the land. This exhibition centers the nahuatl phrase Tlali Nantli which means Madre Tierra or Earthmother, to highlight the sacred relationships that peoples continue to uphold with the earth and all its creations on the Americas.
Tlali Nantli: Conexiones con la tierra, brings together the works of Xican[a]x, Cubana, and African American artists, Gina Aparicio, Nereida Garcia-Ferraz, Suzy Hernandez, Gilda Posada, Celia Herrera Rodriguez, Fan Lee Warren, and John Jairo Valencia. The artists offer an intergenerational political and practical narration of what it means to make the feminine energies on this earth more visible, while putting them into balance with the fe/male ánimas of the earth. The works in this exhibition are tied together through the sacred elements of life: water, earth, wind, and fire. Together, the works deliver a reminder of the important physical and spiritual relationship that exists between humans and the Energies of the earth.
This exhibition is the beginning of an intergenerational collaborative project between these artists that will culminate in a traveling collaborative installation, Teo(tl)ria Xicana : An Assemblage of Energy. In the summer 2021 Celia Herrera Rodriguez invited these artists to come together, with the support of Las Maestras Center at UCSB, to talk about the possibilities of working together on a project that centered the feminine energy that emerges and is hyper-visible during times of crisis and chaos. Rodriguez invited the artist to join her in this project due to their skills, their politica, and their ways of working. Aparicio, Garcia-Ferraz, Hernandez, Posada, Herrera Rodriguez, Lee Warren, and Valencia are all artists that teach and work in community and think about their work as an act of continuity. Teo(tl)ria Xicana: An Assemblage of Energy, the working title of the artistic collaboration will be a traveling installation that will be interactive with the communities in which it is mounted.
Tlali Nantli: Conexiones con la tierra, is the first exhibition of each artists’ individual work, and serves as the first step towards the initial discussion creating in collaboration. The Centro Cultural de la Raza was chosen as the first site of this artistic collaboration in acknowledgment of the historical importance that activist-cultural spaces have held in our communities. We offer these works to augment, re-occupy, revive, and honor the ground created by community artists/activists over the last 50 years.
Gina Aparicio is a queer Xicana artist, teacher, and community organizer from Los Angeles, CA, now teaching middle school in Georgia. As a contemporary artist, she explores several media including ceramics, printmaking, sculpture and performance to give voice to the urban Xicana experience and as a conscious act of healing the wounds of colonization.
Nereida Garcia-Ferraz is a Cuban-born artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, video, sculpture, and social art projects exploring identity and feminist themes, nature, beauty, and the physical world. She has taught at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The San Francisco Art Institute, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Suzy Hernandez is a two spirit Xicana, radical tenderness bruja, interdisciplinary artist born in Los Angeles and living in Davis, CA. Her work in performance art, pen and ink drawing, experimental audio y video, photography, and installation art concentrates on breaking down borders within ourselves to further decolonize the mind, body, y espíritu.
Gilda Posada is a queer Xicana/Salvadoran cultural worker, artist, and curator from Southeast Los Angeles currently teaching at UC Davis. Their artistic praxis integrates Indigenous art forms of patterns, weaving, beading and printmaking and has focused on the material expression of the concept and theory of “Abolish Borders.”
Celia Herrera Rodriguez is a Xicana/O’dami visual artist and educator whose practice reflects a multi-generational dialogue and engagement with Xicana/o, Indigenous Mexican and North American art, thought, spirituality, culture, and politics. She is co-founder and co-director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis; and teaches at UC Santa Barbara.
Fan Lee Warren is a contemporary African American artist, born in Birmingham, AL, and raised in Chicago, who teaches studio art and art history at Laney College in Oakland. Her work examines a mixture of popular and historical perceptions of Black people in the Americas through pigment, graphite, ink, watercolor and acrylic paints.
John Jairo Valencia is a queer Xicanx/Colombian interdisciplinary artist, raised in La Puente and Boyle Heights, CA, curious about storytelling, Indigenous cosmologies, and spiritual ecologies. Their recent illustrative and cultural work has been in conversation with food sovereignty movements, community herbalism projects, and ancestral memory.
