ABUNDANCE
Wed–Fri, April 24–26, 2024, 7–10 PM
L.A. Dance Project
2245 E Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90021
Free parking available on site, wheelchair accessible
Free admission
ABUNDANCE presents cutting edge performance art and interdisciplinary work by artists whose lived experiences as non-traditional or fat bodies challenge intersectional forms of oppression. ABUNDANCE is a call to taking up space with pride, generosity, and a spirit of collectivity. This assembly of artists invites the public to witness and participate in the reclamation of our own plentiful bodies: disrupting the status quo and forging liberatory ways of being through community.
Held over three days at L.A. Dance Project, ABUNDANCE will include re-stagings and new work by performance, sound, and literary artists Patrisse Cullors with Ashley Blakeney and Darius Williams, Edgar Fabián Frías, GayCay, Jessica Carolina González, Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Alima Lee, Caleb Luna, Melba Martínez, Cody Perkins with Sabrina Johnson, Ghis Rodríguez, Yesika Salgado, and Dorian Wood. Responding to the word “abundance,” these artists examine the politics of their existence through the way they see and experience the world, with abundant, generous, humorous, joyful, or rageful entry points that will put our collective and individual biases into question. Two Fat Girls Press (@twofatgirlspress) will be onsite offering a selection of zines available for purchase.
ABUNDANCE is curated by Selene Preciado and Juan Silverio.
Download the Press Release
Download the Digital Program
Know Before You Go
SCHEDULE OF PERFORMANCES:
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
7:50 PM Yesika Salgado
8:10 PM Edgar Fabián Frías
8:45 PM Ghis Rodríguez
9:10 PM Cody Perkins (with Sabrina Johnson)
Thursday, April 25, 2024
7:50 PM Alima Lee
8:10 PM Melba Martínez
8:45 PM Jessica Carolina González
9:20 PM GayCay
Friday, April 26, 2024
7:50 PM Caleb Luna
8:10 PM Vanessa Hernández Cruz
8:45 PM Patrisse Cullors (with Ashley Blakeney and Darius Williams)
9:20 PM Dorian Wood
From left to right:
Row 1: Yesika Salgado, Edgar Fabián Frías
Row 2: Edgar Fabián Frías, Ghis Rodriguez
Row 3: Cody Perkins, Sabrina Johnson, Alima Lee
Row 4: Alima Lee, Melba Martínez
Row 5: Melba Martínez, Jessica Carolina González
Row 6: Gay Cay (Edgar Fabian Frias and Thaddeus Pedisich)
Row 7: Juan Silverio, Selene Preciado, Caleb Luna
Row 8: Vanessa Hernández Cruz
Row 9: Darius Williams, Ashley Blakeney, Patrisse Cullors
Row 10: Dorian Wood
Photos by Angel Origgi
SUPPORT
ABUNDANCE is supported by the Perenchio Foundation and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Special thanks to our friends at L.A. Dance Project for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation. For more information on LACE’s renovation, go to www.welcometolace.org/visit
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ashley Blakeney (she/her/hers) is an arts healing facilitator and arts administrator. With a specific love for photography, expressive writing and music, Ashley holds a passion for using arts healing approaches to empower folks to utilize art as a tool of storytelling and healing. Ashley began her tenure as Executive Director of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart in July 2021, eager to deepen and operationalize the Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s work at the intersection of abolition and healing, with intention and care. In 2015, she received a certification from UCLArts & Healing Certificate program in social emotional arts. While facilitating in classrooms, Ashley used her training to cultivate safe-spaces and build powerful and meaningful relationships with her students. For over a decade, Ashley has committed her personal and professional practice to helping communities feel more engaged, centered and seen. Ashley received her BA at the University of Southern California.
Patrisse Cullors is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, artist, and abolitionist from Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been featured at The Broad, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Frieze LA, The Hammer Museum, The Fowler and a host of theaters, galleries, and museums across the globe. Patrisse has won numerous awards for her art and activism. In 2020 she launched a one of a kind online MFA program at Prescott College. She also launched the Crenshaw Dairy Mart with fellow artists Noé Olivas and Ali Reza Dorriz. Her current work and practice is focusing on “Abolitionist Aesthetics,” a term she has advanced and popularized to help challenge artists and cultural workers to aestheticize abolition. She recently founded The Center For Art and Abolition—a trailblazing nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering abolitionist artists and leveraging the transformative power of art to catalyze social change. Patrisse’s mission is to invite all of us to grow towards abolition through intergenerational healing work that centers love, collective care, and art.
Edgar Fabián Frías is a multidisciplinary artist, psychotherapist, educator, curator, and brujx based in Los Angeles. With a passion for breaking boundaries and creating new forms of knowledge, Frías blends diverse artistic disciplines to produce thought-provoking and immersive works of art that transcend conventional categories. Their oeuvre encompasses installation, photography, video art, sound, sculpture, printed textiles, GIFs, performance, social practice, and community organizing, reflecting their commitment to experimentation and innovation. Frías’ work explores themes of resistance, resiliency, and radical imagination in the face of colonization, environmental racism, and other contemporary issues. Drawing on Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, play, pedagogy, animism, witchcraft, and queer aesthetics, Frías offers a unique perspective on the complexities of modern society. Through their art, they bridge the gap between the traditional and the contemporary and create spaces for contemplation and transformation. As a nonbinary, Wixárika, and Latinx artist whose family hails from Mexico, Frías brings a rich and diverse background to their practices. They hold dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from UC Riverside, and an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling with a focus on Interpersonal Neurobiology and Somatic Psychotherapy from Portland State University. In 2022, they completed an MFA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley.
GayCay began as a nomadic space for experimentation between multidisciplinary artists and partners Edgar Fabián Frías and Thaddeus Pedisich. They create frenzied minimal synthpunk, the likes of DAF, Nitzer Ebb, and Adult. Formed in Los Angeles in 2017, GayCay’s intention is to be a platform for a collective message of hope and the urgency of queer and trans liberation. Emerging from the Portland underground music scene, Pedisich’s former musical projects include PinkSlime and Dopesmoker (PDX), among others. Frías, a contemporary artist originally from Southern California, has exhibited internationally and has a solo project called Galaxias Eternas. The band self-released their first self-titled debut in 2020.
Jessica Carolina González is an artist from Houston, TX, based in Los Angeles. By collapsing temporalities from a Central American diasporic perspective, she confronts the Estadounidense understanding of ever-present sociopolitical issues embedded within her work. Archival practices and archives of the bloodline are her tools for storytelling and critique in a postcolonial landscape. González has exhibited at The Printing Museum, Law Warschaw Gallery, and Mulvane Art Museum among others. She was an invited panelist for Latino Art Now! and curated In the Sun a symposium and exhibition at The Station Museum. Additionally, González was awarded the first prize for the juried exhibition Withstand at the Holocaust Museum Houston, the Idea Fund by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and was a finalist for the Houston Artadia Award. González is currently an MFA candidate at USC and holds a BFA in Photography/Digital Media, BA in World Cultures and Literatures, and Minor in Spanish.
Vanessa Hernández Cruz is an interdependent and interdisciplinary Chicana Disabled dance artist based in Tongva Land/Los Angeles, CA. Her dance, visual artwork, and writings are often woven together to generate works influenced by dark aesthetics, abstractions, experimentation, and storytelling that merges her Chicana Disabled experiences. Over the past few years Vanessa’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the 2023 California Arts Council x The Center of Cultural Power Artist Disruptor Award. In 2023, she premiered two exciting dance solos: Metal, Plastic, Skin debuting at The Odyssey Theatre’s Dance Festival and Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes debuting at REDCAT’s NOW Festival. Vanessa, along with Saira Barbaric and NEVE, recently co-founded Mouthwater Festival with support from the Mellon Foundation. A new Disabled arts festival in Seattle, the first Mouthwater Festival is slated for fall 2024.
Sabrina Johnson is a dance artist and producer based in Los Angeles, whose formal training includes education from Lula Washington, Karen McDonald, and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Her professional portfolio includes the works of master choreographers Maurya Kerr, Christian Burns, Gregory Dawson, Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, and Danielle Agami. Co-founder of the movement-based initiative No)one. Art House, Sabrina is a driving force behind the production of many captivating performances, films, educational workshops, and immersive movement-based art installations. Her artistic journey is marked by a commitment to pushing boundaries and merging creativity with purpose.
Alima Lee is a transdisciplinary artist from New York City and is currently based between Los Angeles and New York City. Their work examines the human condition and attempts to reclaim their own image. It’s an ongoing experiment in producing physical evidence from the residue of existence. Working in an uninhibited range of mediums from video installation and sound to printmaking and sculpture, their work is on an ever-constant free-fall from structure. Their video and installation work has been presented at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Los Angeles, Tate Modern, MOCA, Smithsonian African American Museum, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and ICA Boston, among other global entities.
Caleb Luna is an artist, public scholar and theorist of the body. They are an award-winning educator and scholar, the bestselling author of REVENGE BODY (Nomadic Press, 2022; Black Lawrence Press, 2023), and co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. Publishing, performing and curating across genre and medium, Caleb’s cultural work examines race, size, sexuality and disability in media and culture. Ultimately, they are interested in engaging embodied difference as a generative resource toward fatter understandings of collective freedom. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You can follow Caleb on Instagram and Twitter at @dr_chairbreaker, or get in touch with them at caleb-luna.com
Melba Martínez is an artist and cultural organizer from Pacoima, CA. Their passion for art, activism, and the fight for the liberation of all oppressed people guide her life and work. Melba has worked as an arts administrator with a variety of for and non-profit organizations across Los Angeles. Their art praxis focuses on the body as a site for joy, pleasure, and liberation. Melba’s art practice involves performance, modeling, video art, film, installation, fiber arts, makeup, and styling. They weave their varied knowledge together to create space for historically excluded voices in the arts and the world at large.
Cody Perkins (also known as Algorythm.Code) is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Sylmar, CA. He attended the Alexander Hamilton Music Academy as a Performance and Electronic Music major and continued his studies with a focus on photography and audio engineering at Cal State Dominguez Hills. His work has been shown in institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Hammer, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA). He has scored numerous films and installations for brands and artists, is the founder of the musical collective The Algorythms, and has produced music for many independent genre-bending musicians locally and internationally.
Ghis Rodríguez (Tijuana, Baja California, 1993) is a visual artist, educator, and arts administrator. She founded Tierras Seminario de Arte (2022), and has a B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Baja California (UABC, 2021), including an exchange program at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico City (ENAP, 2019–2020). Solo exhibitions include venues such as Heta Galería (2022), Índigo Carmín (2022), Antiguo Cine Bujazan (2023). Group exhibitions include 2do Salón de Artes Visuales, Planta Libre, Mexicali (2023) where she obtained the acquisition award; Women, Words and Weaving/Mujeres, Palabras y Tejidos, The Front Arte y Cultura, San Diego, CA (2023); and Frieze, L.A. (2023). Other venues where her work has been exhibited in Tijuana include La Caja Galería, Ángulo Galería, Sala Álvaro Blancarte, Casa de la Cultura, and Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura (IMAC). Rodríguez has participated in ceramic and performance projects such as Crítica de Fenómenos Cerámicos, UNAM (2019), Archivo de Performance, MUAC (2019), Yuriy Yuyay, Bogotá (2018) and Muestra Internacional de performance, Guadalajara (2020). As an artist, her main interest is to raise awareness and critical reflection around body image and gender, exploring themes such as stereotypes, stigma, and violence, through performance, sculpture, and conceptual design, connecting threads to materiality, the body as medium, and performative presence.
Yes
ika Salgado is a Los Angeles-based Salvadoran poet who writes about her family, her culture, her city, and her fat body. Salgado is a two time National Poetry Slam finalist and the recipient of the 2020 International Latino Book Award in Poetry. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, Univision, CNN, NPR, and many other platforms. She is an internationally recognized body-positive advocate, writer of the column Suelta for Remezcla and contributor to refinery29’s Latine platform Somos. Yesika is the author of the best-sellers Corazón, Tesoro, and Hermosa, published with Not a Cult.
Dorian Wood (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with her artistic practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people. Her work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at institutions like The Broad (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Museo Nacional Del Prado (Madrid), the City Hall of Madrid and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris (Mexico City). From 2019 to 2020, she completed several successful tours throughout Europe, Mexico and the U.S. with her chamber orchestra tribute to Chavela Vargas, XAVELA LUX AETERNA. Wood is a recipient of a 2023 LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, a 2023 NALAC Fund for the Arts grant, a 2020 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Art Matters Foundation grant. In 2023, Wood premiered Canto de Todes, a touring 12-hour chamber music composition and installation that emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a conduit for social change. She has also released over a dozen recordings, most recently the albums You are clearly in perversion (2023, Astral Editions), in collaboration with Thor Harris; and Excesiva (Dragon’s Eye Recordings, 2023).
Two Fat Girls Press is a collaboration between Karen Herrera and Yerika Reyes, two cross-country friends (Los Angeles/Chicago) and interdisciplinary artists. Bonded for over a decade by their shared identities as fat Latinas, first-generation college graduates, and eldest daughters of immigrants, they’ve made art together across disciplines. Together, they bring an interest in the archive, the body, the intersection of food and politics, and healing, with art and community. They graduated from Pomona College with a degree in Art and Sociology respectively. Their primary mediums include the written word, photography, illustration, cooking, printmaking, and collage. They share a background in community-based work, and in 2015 they organized and led a youth arts outreach program in the San Gabriel Valley. Currently, Karen and Yerika are working on a food, music, and fatness art performance piece set to take place in Chicago in the fall of 2024. Two Fat Girls Press began publishing zines in 2023. Their breakout zine, Lockdown Locas, explored surviving the pandemic in two fat Latina bodies. Their most recent publications explore travel and movement in 2024.
