Photo (L-R): Artemisa Clark (photo by Ray Barerra), Karla Diaz (photo by Lluvia Higuera), Jaklin Romine (photo by William Camargo).
May 9, 11+12, 2024
Heavy Manners Library
1200 N Alvarado St, Los Angeles, CA 90026
About LACE’s Unresidencies
The 2024 LACE Unresidencies support artistic research connected to contemporary issues within Los Angeles’s cultural landscape. This year, LACE invited three artists to produce a zine and a public program focused on family histories, memory, and healing. The artists’ publications will be available for purchase at Heavy Manners Library from May 9–12, 2024, and on LACE’s website.
Inspired by the success of the LACE Summer Residencies founded in 2014, LACE is engaging in an experimental artistic research residency with three artists over the next year. This program continues LACE’s longtime commitment to experimental work, especially while in the midst of a major renovation and are working out of our gallery until 2026. Visit www.welcometolace.org/visit for more details.
Schedule of Public Programs
Thursday, May 9, 2024, 7–9 PM
Jaklin Romine: Roses and Butterflies Floating Towards Her Power and Love / Rosas y mariposas que flotan hacia su poder y amor
Artist Jaklin Romine has used her time in LACE’s Unresidency program to reflect and celebrate her relationship with her grandmother, her Abuela. While her grandmother was alive, they would share long lunches and lengthy talks about her life, her misadventures, and her heart’s ups and downs. During this time of togetherness, Romine’s grandmother would tell her that she believed her life’s story was destined to be a book. Her retelling left a lasting impression on Romine’s soul.
For her LACE Unresidency, Romine created a zine that honors their time together. Titled Roses and Butterflies Floating Towards Her Power and Love / Rosas y mariposas que flotan hacia su poder y amor, the zine takes a closer examination of Romine’s grandmother’s artistry as a seamstress and her personal style, combined with the flowers that the artist gave her grandmother while she was still alive. The zine reflects on these memories through photography and words, and is fused with Romine’s own artistry through the layering of transparency film, glitter cardstock, Riso printing, hand cut outs, and combinations of photography, craft, and design.
Join artist Jaklin Romine for a reading of poetry and texts about her grandmother, featured on her zine Roses and Butterflies Floating Towards Her Power and Love / Rosas y mariposas que flotan hacia su poder y amor.
Visit the LACE online shop to purchase Roses and Butterflies Floating Towards Her Power and Love / Rosas y mariposas que flotan hacia su poder y amor.
Saturday, May 11, 2024, 2–4 PM
Artemisa Clark: Dearest Michita
Dearest Michita is based on an archive that shouldn’t exist. It is composed of 56 letters written between June 25, 1939, and March 16, 1940, by the artist’s grandfather to her grandmother, following his disappearance two weeks after their first daughter was born. Never discussed by the grandparents “Tita” (abuelita), and “Tito” (abuelito), the letters were kept as a family secret, and were supposed to be destroyed upon Tita’s death in 2001. Clark discovered this archive upon the death of her uncle in 2020. Clark was named after Tita and her first born daughter, the three of them nicknamed Micha or Michita (diminutive versions of Artemisa). The letters read as if addressed to Clark in present time, drawing a deep personal connection for the artist.
The archive of letters tells the story of a man—a Mexican national who later became a United States citizen—who, during the final years of the Great Depression fell into severe debt, causing him to flee to Mexico City, and abandon his wife and two week-old child for two years. His choice remains a family secret that has led to more questions than answers. These letters also tell a story of the socioeconomic precarity of Mexican nationals in the U.S. at the time of Mexican Repatriation (1929–1939) and The Bracero Program (1942). Tita and Tito would go on to raise four children over the course of their 47-year marriage, ending upon his death. Tito died before Clark was born, and by then he held a mythic status in the family. He was the doting husband and parent, the perfect grandparent, the life of any party. However, Clark was not able to relate to him until she found letters from what seems to be one of the darkest periods of her grandparents’ relationship.
Combining personal, familial, and historical archives, Clark’s performance will explore what was not said in the letters, the questions they evoked, and her personal exploration of a history discovered through omission.
Visit the LACE online shop to purchase Dearest Michita.
Sunday, May 12, 2024, 2–4 PM
Karla Diaz: Better Luck Next Time–A Fictitious Love Horoscope with Walter Mercado
For her LACE Unresidency project, Diaz explores notions of disappointment and failure by reimagining Mercado’s words as “better luck next time!” through an illustrated horoscope poster depicting each sign inspired by Diaz’s love relationships.
Join artist Karla Diaz in a performative conversation with artist Edgar Fabián Frías to celebrate the launch of the artist’s limited edition poster, Better Luck Next Time: A Fictitious Love Horoscope with Walter Mercado.
About the Artists
Artemisa Clark is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles. She received a MA in performance studies from Northwestern University in 2016 and a MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. She has exhibited and presented research in spaces such as The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, MOCA, The Hammer, the Mexican Consulate, the Vincent Price Art Museum, and Commonwealth & Council, all in Los Angeles; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA; Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA; the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro X, Santiago, Chile; and SOMA, Mexico City.
Karla Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist, educator who engages in painting, social practice, and performance. Using narrative to question identity and explore memory, her socially-engaged practice generates exciting collaborations and provokes important dialogue among diverse communities. Notably, she is the co-founder of the socially-engaged collective and community artist space Slanguage. In her painting introspection, splashes of color became figures and objects that transformed into scenes of domesticity and city life drawn from her upbringing in Mexico and Los Angeles. Personal memories, folklore, familiar iconography of her Mexican heritage, and American pop culture are intertwined in surreal compositions that consider family, loss, and the complexities of the Latinx experience in the United States.
Her works have been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally at (MOCA) Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; LAXART, Hollywood, CA; Pitzer College, Claremont, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Serpentine Gallery, London, U.K.; among others. Her work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including Art Matters, New York, NY and Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY. Karla Diaz lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is represented by Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles.
Jaklin Romine was born in Burbank, California, and currently lives in Pasadena. She lived in East LA [El Sereno] for 15 years, before that she lived in Echo Park, and grew up in Alhambra/San Gabriel. She studied Studio Arts at Cal State LA, and got her Masters of Fine Art at CalArts. Romine has been working professionally since 2015 and has exhibited in group exhibitions across Los Angeles at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, NAVEL, Noysky Projects, Superstition Gallery, One Archives, Night Gallery, Dominique Gallery, Avenue 50 Studio, Gallery 825, Eastside Cafe, Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, and in New York at Flux Factory, Gibney Studios, New Women Space. She has lectured on her work at UCLA, NY Film Academy, Chapman University, Scripps College, Torrance Art Museum, Cal Arts, as part of the ArtChangeUS: Arts in a Changing America five year initiative. Her work has been featured in The New York Times; Hyperallergic; Curate LA; KCET; on the cover, centerfold, and contributor of Full Blede; and X-TRA. In 2019 she won the Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Grant which supported her first solo exhibition, Why Bring Me Flowers When I’m Dead? When You Had The Time To Do It When I Was Alive/Living With SCI, PSLA, Los Angeles, CA. The work from her solo show has since been curated in group shows at The Wignall Museum, Consulado General de Mexico, SUR Biennial at Rio Hondo College. Simultaneously, Jaklin created a zine from her photographic work and traveled to the Shanghai Art Book Fair, Independent Art Book Fair in LA & NY, Long Beach Zine Fest, San Diego Zine Fest, San Francisco Zine Fest, and Los Angeles Zine Fest. Currently she is working on new photographic and installation work with artist Ginger Quintanilla (Ginger Q).
Support
Support for the LACE unresidency program is provided by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the Perenchio Foundation.
