Archives Conversation
Saturday, December 6, 2025, 2–5 PM | RSVP here
Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90032
Parking is available on the top deck of Structure C, located directly in front of The Luckman.
A Tender Excavation approaches research-based artistic practices through propositions of alternative histories, bringing together a group of artists who 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 G 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.
Moderated by archivist and public historian Moriah Ulinskas, this conversation will address how artists and local organizations work with historical and community archives. Speakers include Lylliam Posadas, co-founder and co-director of Your Neighborhood Museum; Keko Jackson, artist/Archivist at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive; and artists Leah King, and Camille Wong. The program concludes with a live music performance by Leah King at 4:00 PM.
About the Panelists
Keko Jackson is an artist and archivist living in Los Angeles. His work extends across photography, curation, writing and publications that take a discursive approach to history and its relationship to images.
Leah King is a multimedia artist working in collage, sound, film, and performance. Her intricately layered visual and sonic works explore race, gender, and power through a futurist lens. Centering archives as portals for future-building, King creates multisensory installations rooted in ancestral storytelling and community repair. As a vocalist and composer, she creates soundscapes influenced by house, gospel, and experimental jazz. King’s work has been exhibited at SFMOMA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and Charlie James Gallery, and supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Berlin Music Board, and many others. She holds an MFA from USC Roski School of Art and Design, where she researched house music and Black futurity, and a BA from Barnard College/Columbia University in Black diasporic music and dance.
Lylliam Posadas is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Your Neighborhood Museum and the Colonial Pathways Repatriation Manager at the Museum of Us. Lylliam has over 15 years of experience in repatriation and focuses on collaborative program development, community-led research practices, and transformative justice practices in museums. Lylliam has field experience in Ghana, Peru, Louisiana and California, and experience facilitating repatriation, building repatriation programs, and guiding research protocols at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Autry Museum of the American West, and the Museum of Us. Lylliam received an M.Sc. in Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials from University College London, and Bachelor degrees in Anthropology and Psychology from UCLA.
Moriah Ulinskas is a community archivist and public historian whose research examines histories of dispossession, focusing on how marginalized communities organized to resist displacement and how that history of resistance lies latent in archival collections today. Her work investigates both the physical displacement of minority communities and their erasure from historical memory, examining how these groups preserved their stories despite systematic exclusion from official narratives. She is a founding member of the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW), a collective of audiovisual archivists who facilitate audiovisual preservation in community-held collections. Since 2011, CAW has collaborated with 65 organizations across four continents to conduct archival preservation workshops and kickstart community archives.
Camille Wong (they/she) is a research-based artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Their practice examines power, geopolitics, and historiography through the lens of media and spectacle. They approach the gaze of ethnography by authoring the personal into the world through experimental documentary. Their recent work examines media and rhetoric during the Cold War, exploring how these broader political systems shaped global ideologies and immigration patterns. Their work has been shown at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has exhibited their work throughout Los Angeles including the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and Monte Vista Projects. They received their MFA in Media Art at UCLA and BAs in Art and Environmental Studies from UCSB.
Support
A Tender Excavation is made possible thanks to our friends at The Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State LA. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Teiger Foundation.
