Tumbados Symposium

Storefront for Art and Architecture and The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union present Tumbados, a symposium celebrating artist Guadalupe Rosales and a decade of her ongoing archive project titled Veteranas and Rucas. This dynamic event including poetry, performance, panel discussions, and live music, is organized as part of her year-long public artwork with Lokey Calderon on Storefront’s facade. Tumbados engages with lowrider culture and its role within the built environment in creating and shaping spaces for Latin@/x public life. The symposium invites an intergenerational group of artists, writers and scholars to delve into Rosales’s community-focused practice and the expanded subjects of Queer life that she addresses. Her work commemorates and historicizes Chicanx subcultures, while fostering collective storytelling and self-affirmation, engaging audiences from LA to NYC and beyond.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz will open the symposium, followed by keynote speaker and artist Estevan Oriol, who will discuss archives and counter-archives in conversation with Rocío Aranda-Alvarado. Arts critic and educator Raquel Gutiérrez will present a reading on Queer Brown Urbanism, artist, friend and collaborator of Rosales, rafa esparza will participate with a performance, and will be followed by a panel discussion by Rosales and Associate Professor of American Studies Leticia Alvarado, moderated by LACMA Curator and Department Head in Contemporary Art Rita Gonzalez. Que Chola Tan Rica will close the event with a music set.

Learn more about the project here.

Guadalupe Rosales is a multidisciplinary artist who uses archives to create immersive and sensorial spaces to activate memory and evoke collective experience. Rosales is best known for creating community-generated archival projects responding to the under/misrepresentation and historical erasure of Latin@/x communities in Southern California. Her work has been presented at institutions including the Museo Universitario del Chopo, the Dallas Museum of Art, Haus der Kunst, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and Storefront for Art and Architecture. 

Lokey Calderon is a tattoo artist and custom car painter based in Dallas Texas specializing in pinstripes and airbrushing. He previously collaborated with Guadalupe Rosales on a lowrider mural installation at the Dallas Art Museum in 2022.

Ashley Alcantar is an artist and DJ based in Los Angeles. Her work is centered around her upbringing on the Juarez, Chihuahua and El Paso, Texas border, where the complexity of music, fashion and cultural lifestyles are juxtaposed and create a new and distinct culture. Alcantar is dedicated to supporting marginalized communities, organizing benefit events and fundraising parties that not only celebrate culture but also raise awareness and give back.

Leticia Alvarado is Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian, Ford Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. She is the author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2018) as well as numerous publications in academic journals, and exhibition catalogues including Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A, Firelei Baéz (ICA Boston), and Scientia Sexualis (ICA Los Angeles). Her current book project, Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation, received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is part of the Creativity and Free Expression team at the Ford Foundation. She joined Ford in 2018 after serving as curator at El Museo del Barrio for nearly a decade. In that role, she presented visual arts and programming that reflected the history and culture of El Barrio as well as the greater Latinx and Latin American diaspora. Prior to that, from 2000 to 2009, she was the curator at the Jersey City Museum.

Natalie Diaz was born on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, among other awards. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was recognized with an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She is a recipient of the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She is a current Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellow and a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. She is the 2024-25 Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence and 2024 Margaret Case Foundation Freedom Fellow.  

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces. whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces. 

Raquel Gutiérrez is a writer, performer and the author of Brown Neon (Coffee House Press), a 2023 Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Firework Award in Creative Nonfiction and Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. A 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Gutiérrez was recently a Fall 2024 Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts where they worked on their new poetry collection, Southwest Reconstruction (a triptych), out late Fall 2025 on Noemi Press, and essays on anti-authoritarianist impulses for a new collection TBD. Gutiérrez lives on unceded lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui people.

Rita Gonzalez is Curator and Department Head in Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she has curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection; Agnès Varda in Californialand; and A Universal History of Infamy, among other exhibitions. 

Estevan Oriol is an internationally celebrated professional photographer, entrepreneur and director of the documentary LA Originals and the music video for Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain. Going from being a hip-hop club bouncer to a tour manager for popular Los Angeles-based rap groups Cypress Hill and House of Pain, Estevan’s passion for photography developed as he documented life on the road and established a name for himself in the then-emerging hip-hop scene.

Tumbados is the second commission of Storefront’s Groundworks series, which invites artists to present public artworks on Storefront’s iconic facade for an extended period. By engaging passersby through the gallery’s exterior wall, this initiative positions Storefront’s facade as a site of critical discourse, weaving together notions of place and identity within the built environment. Through each artistic commission, the series fosters understanding around the complex ideas of public life, celebrating the community, history, and politics that are inextricably linked to the construction of cultural identity within specific times and contexts.