About this Artist
Guadalupe Rosales (b.1980 Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator best known for her community generated archival projects, “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” found on social media. The projects manifested in 2015 from the under/misrepresentation and historical erasure of Latin@/x communities in Southern California. These community-generated projects begin with an open invitation to various Latin@/x communities to share personal images and memories that create visual narratives that celebrate identities and historicize subcultures. The archives explore ideas about how history and culture are framed and who does the framing. As a counterpoint, the archive celebrates, humanizes and reflects the positive and honest attributes of our shared culture. It creates a space for collective healing and storytelling and finds ways for new dialogue to emerge about youth culture in Southern California that would not exist otherwise.
In her studio practice, Guadalupe works with sculpture, photography, video, sound, drawing, and community based projects and collaborations, and the archive, centering on the creation of immersive and sensorial spaces to activate memory and evoke a collective experience and embodiment. These spaces conjure up emotions as well as collective feelings of longing that reside in our bodies and remain as living archives. Here, she wants us to consider the body as archives and a locus that preserves, carries, moves, and transforms memory but also intervenes in the continuum of a life archived. The purpose is to uplift private experiences and create space for them to be shared, to see what is concealed and collectively create a multidimensional experience.
Guadalupe’s studio also houses and preserves a physical archive of Chicano/Latinx ephemera from the 1970s to the late-1990s, including but not limited to magazines, prison art and letters, posters and flyers from the Los Angeles underground backyard-party and rave scenes of the 1990s.