Artist and Curator Walkthroughs
Saturday, January 17, 2026, 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.
Know Before You Go
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.
At the Artist and Curator Walkthroughs, gain deeper insights into the exhibition through 30-min curator and artist walkthroughs offered at 3 PM and 4 PM with Zeynep Abes, Jamil G Baldwin, Heesoo Kwon, Arlene Mejorado, Star Montana, and Arleene Correa Valencia, amongst others. Light refreshments will be provided.
About the Artists
Zeynep Abes is an artist, researcher and educator from Istanbul, Turkey. She studied film and interactive media at Emerson College, later getting her start at LACMA’s Art+Tech lab. She then worked at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Exhibitions and is a graduate of UCLA’s Design Media Arts MFA program. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Media Arts and Practice program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She primarily works with archival media, 3D scanning technologies and immersive media. Her subjects revolve around identity, history, and loss of memory. She is in pursuit of exploring the role artists play in preserving memories to navigate the struggle and alienation that arise from changing social environments and shifting identities. Her work has been featured in notable festivals and conferences like Ars Electronica, Siggraph, ISEA, IEEE and the LA Art Show.
Jamil G Baldwin (b. 1988) was born in Lancaster, CA and raised in and across the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. Baldwin’s work explores the ability of the photographic document to reconstitute the histories of images and material into value systems of care. Images of either his geography, neighbors, or family are housed within or made into objects that reward curiosity and patience. They aim to highlight practices of connection with respect to locales and communities. He received his BS and BA from The Wharton School of Business at University of Pennsylvania. He is currently pursuing his MFA in visual arts from University of California, San Diego. His images have been exhibited at the Sculpture Center, PioneerWorks, Band of Vices, Belfast Photo Festival, Lagos Photo Festival, and included in the following publications: New York Times, Aperture, Matte Editions, JRNL, and Callaloo. His work has also been acquired by the Kinsey Collection.
Heesoo Kwon (b. South Korea) is a multimedia artist based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her practice engages socio-ritualistic, autoethnographic, and archival methods to explore feminist technologies and speculative mythologies. Working with 3D animation, modeling, and AI as generative tools, Kwon constructs heterotopic hyperspaces where time and memory are abstracted—enabling a rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, a queering of familial relations, and the envisioning of decentralized communities and memoryscapes. These explorations are most notably embodied in her self-referential feminist religion Leymusoom and the Leymusoom Firefly series, which draws from AI-augmented family photographs from her childhood. Within these constructed realms, Kwon transcends inherited legacies of sacrifice, trauma, and patriarchal violence to propose transformative modes of existence, liberation, and kinship.
Arlene Mejorado is an artist from Los Angeles who works through analog and digital image-making processes to contemplate ideas around memory, landscape, and placemaking. Often working intuitively, Mejorado’s practice ranges from traditional documenting to staging scenes that merge elements of installation, performance, and studio photography. Her ethos is well attributed to her upbringing in a migrant and multiethnic household as she engages in a form of repair work—countering erasure and mending fragments in personal, collective, and diasporic stories and archives. Mejorado has been awarded the Center for Photography at Woodstock Artist Residency, Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice fellowship, Aperture Creator’s Lab, and the DocX fellowship with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her photography and installations have been exhibited at Paris Photo, The Modern, Luisotti Gallery, Vielmetter, Charlie James Gallery, Culver Center of the Arts, New Wight Gallery, and ICP. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California in San Diego. Mejorado is specialized in the profession of digitization and imaging, preserving and creating accessibility for fine art collections and institutional and community archives.
Star Montana is a photo-based artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She was born and raised in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, which is predominantly Mexican American and serves as the backdrop to much of her work. Her work has recently been exhibited at Charlie James Gallery (2019, 2016); Residency Art Gallery (2018); LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (2018); Occidental College (2017); The Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts at the Mexican Consulate General of Mexico (2017); The Main Museum (2017); Ballroom Marfa (2017); and Vincent Price Art Museum (2016). Montana will be an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2020. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Art from the University of Southern California, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, and an Associate of Arts in Photography from East Los Angeles College.
Arleene Correa Valencia (b. 1993, Michoacán, Mexico) is a contemporary artist who moved to California’s Napa Valley with her family in 1997. A DACA beneficiary pursuing U.S. citizenship, she earned her MFA from California College of the Arts and has achieved remarkable recognition in the art world. Correa Valencia is a Bay Area Fellowship recipient at Headlands Center for the Arts and won a regional Emmy for her KQED Arts feature. She was named a 2023 Eureka Fellow by the Fleishhacker Foundation and became a SECA Award finalist at SFMOMA. Her work appeared at The Armory Show alongside Stephanie Syjuco in 2023.
Her exhibitions span internationally, including solo shows at the Trout Museum of Art, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, and MCA Gallery in Ontario. Recent museum exhibitions occurred at Bolinas Museum and Utah Museum of Fine Arts in 2024. Her work is held in prestigious collections including Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and the Crocker Art Museum. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2022.
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 Teiger Foundation.
