Invisible Stories: Conversation with Tanya Aguiñiga

For this episode recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger speaks with our dear friend and powerhouse artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga about the cochineal beetle, clay as a healing practice for immigrant detainment camps, Indigenous solidarity and Tanya’s ongoing work with AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides.

Tanya Aguiñiga is an artist, designer, and craftsperson, who works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rights issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist co-built and for six years ran a community center in Tijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local community faced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout her career, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation of other artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexico border, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. Her inaugural AMBOS project, Border Quipu, used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizational system—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.

Support the work Tanya is doing with AMBOS which stands for Art Made Between Opposite Sides, including a donating directly to the  AMBOS Ceramics program, which Tanya speaks of in this podcast.

AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides): http://www.ambosproject.com
Donate to AMBOS Ceramics program: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/ambos
Learn More about Tanya’s work: http://www.tanyaaguiniga.com

Music Featured: For The Young by Kindness

Future Radicalized Ancestors: Conversation with Kristy Moreno

In this episode we speak with Mexican American Ceramic and Multidisciplinary artist Kristy Moreno who is a current long-term resident artist at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (The Bray). 

“My current body of work examines the systems and bonds between social, political, and personal narratives. These narratives intersect to embody forms of relativity, healing and resilience. By producing these physically paused moments, I introduce a space for reflection which investigates the journey of my personal point of view, individual habits and character.” - Kristy Moreno

Artist Kristy Moreno in the studio with her sculpture work at The Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts.

Kristy Moreno was born in the city of Inglewood, California and often found herself creating doodles of her favorite cartoons. Moving to Orange County inspired her to become involved in the art communities of Santa Ana, leading her to collaborate with group collectives including We Are Rodents and Konsept. She then attended Santa Ana College where she found an interest in ceramics that led her to transfer to California State University, Chico to pursue a BFA degree. Her work now spans across mediums to bring awareness and visibility to an abundant future where mutual aid is possible.

Website: https://kristymorenoart.weebly.com
IG: @kristy.moreno 
Song Featured: Mar Iguana by É Arenas

Liminal Beings: Conversation with Joseph M. Pierce

In this episode recurring host and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger gets into conversation with Joseph M. Pierce, a Citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University where he teaches and researches about Queer Studies, Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. Joseph is also a writer and an artist who often collaborates with other Queer, Trans and 2spirit Indigenous Kin on curation and performance work. In this conversation Joseph and Cannupa speak about the points of connection within community through time, focusing on the realms of storytelling and speculative fiction that weave us together in continuum.  

More about the Artist:
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19 th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Ways to engage with Joseph’s work:
Joseph M. Pierce website
Dayunisi's Turn
Knowledge of Wounds
Joseph and SJ Norman in conversation about their collaborative practice

Featured Song: Performing Life from Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ by Elisa Harkins

On The Other Side Of Time: Conversation with Evan Starling-Davis

In this episode we hear from New York-based narrative artist, producer, and curator Evan Starling-Davis who excavates the everyday stories pushed beneath the margins of our society. Navigating his lens as a Black and queer digital-age griot, Evan’s work breaches the hard facts, personal truths, and surreal realities we bury ourselves in. His artistic practice is situated within art immersion, mindfulness pedagogy, and experiential technology, and is heavily guided by the Black Speculative Arts Movement (Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism specifically). 

Evan Starling-Davis is in conversation with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger who is a recurring host with Broken Boxes and who often accesses speculative fiction in his practice from the perspective of an Indigenous person of the Great Plains of North America. This episode was recorded at Colgate University in Hamilton New York as a part of a recent  artist residency. Special thanks to Nick West, Curator of Picker Art Gallery for the introductions to Evan Starling-Davis and for organizing a studio on campus to record this conversation. 

Evan Starling-Davis is a New York-based narrative artist, producer, and curator, excavating the everyday stories pushed beneath the margins of our society. Navigating his lens as a Black and queer digital-age griot, Evan’s work breaches the hard facts, personal truths, and surreal realities we bury ourselves in. A doctoral candidate of Literacy Education at Syracuse University with a focus in extended reality (XR) technology, Starling-Davis researches and facilitates arts-based literacy and social justice projects and interventions for Black communities in the US. His artistic practice is situated within art immersion, mindfulness pedagogy, and experiential technology, and is heavily guided by the Black Speculative Arts Movement (Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism specifically). To create new pathways for Black imagination and media literacy to flourish, Evan combines motivational design, multimedia arts, and immersive technology in striking new ways. Exploring immersive technologies as tools of healing (such as virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality) his most recent project, Hidden Fragments Breathing, models the radical potential immersive art exposure has to transform literacy in Black communities across the Rust Belt. As a curator with meticulous attention-to-detail, Starling-Davis has managed public humanities projects and community-based art experiences from conception to completion. His interdisciplinary projects have been featured in art galleries, museums, and theaters internationally. More recently, he has been selected as a 2020-2021 Humanities NY Public Humanities Fellow, a 2019-2020 Louise B. and Bernard G. Palitz Art Scholar, and a 2018-2019 Syracuse University McKean Scholar. 

Music Featured: Saffron by MF DOOM from Metal Fingers Presents: Special Herbs Vol. 1 & 2 

Brown Skin, Black Music, White Institutions: Conversation with Mario Ybarra, Jr.

Mario Ybarra, Jr., is a visual and performance artist, an educator and an activist who combines street culture with fine art in order to produce what he calls “contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican American experience in Los Angeles.” 

Mario has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, ICA Boston, LACMA, MOCA Detroit, the Tate and the Whitney Biennial, among others. He was a featured speaker at the Creative Summit in New York, and Art Pace San Antonio and has taught at Williams College, UCLA, Otis, CalArts, Skowhegan and the Alternative School. 

His work with Slanguage studio, a project Mario founded with his partner Karla Diaz 20 years  ago, has been an influential and oftentimes the sole provider of arts in his community. Slanguage has been based out of an old bakery shop in Wilmington Ca, out of a warehouse in  Long beach Ca, out of LAX art in Hollywood, and has seen many changes and iterations. What does not change is a lifetime commitment to their community with contribution to the careers of many young artists, curators and organizers practicing in the artworld and affecting change today.

This conversation is presented by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, a recurring host who is leading the Spring/Summer sessions of the podcast for 2022. This episode was produced by Ginger Dunnill for Broken Boxes Podcast. 

Follow Mario’s work on IG @mario_ybarra_jr and Slanguage Studio @slanguagestudio
Music featured: Young, Gifted and Brown by Joe Bataan