LOS ANGELES — Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery presents “Queerteñx: Trans Fronterizes / Cuir Transnationalism,” featuring artists Salvador de la Torre and José Villalobos, through March 23, 2024. Guest curated by Erika Hirugami, “Queerteñx” features a collection of multimedia works challenging ideas of machismo while celebrating queer norteño, emo norteño, and rancho cholo cultures.
The exhibition is intimately tied to the México-United States border aesthetically, historically, geographically, symbolically, visually, and conceptually. In the show, the aesthetic achievements of de la Torre and Villalobos converge to theoretically queer citizenship and problematize machismo from a queer/trans axis — nepantleando in diaspora — where queerness is a site of infinite possibility.
In Queerteñx, a sea of Tejanas is sprinkled with fragments of one undocumented immigrant’s shirt, amongst chiseled leather belts and charola belt buckles, amidst hand-embroidered confessions, and the lurking presence of both El Rio Grande y el Desierto de Arizona. Here, barbed wire collides with hundreds of photographs that celebrate often contested journeys of struggle and resilience, both queer (embodied) and undocumented immigrant (inherited).
Through this project, de la Torre and Villalobos celebrate, honor, applaud, and commemorate Queerteñx (queer norteñx), emorteño (emo norteño), rancholo (rancho cholo), Norteño, and Mexican Rancho cultures. All of them are so intertwined that they cannot be teased out from one another. Read more about the exhibition here.
Free Public Programming
Sat., March 2, 6-9 p.m.: Performance / Political Art Action
Bring your Tejana and step into the Palenque (cockpit). Artists in the ring at 6:30 p.m. Free and open at the Laband Art Gallery. RSVP here.
About the Artists
Salvador de la Torre is a Mexican-born, Texas-raised, artist, educator, and storyteller in Southern California. Their drawing and performance work invokes the power of personal experience and family history to create artworks that exist at the intersection of activism, art production and the praxis of self-acceptance. José Villalobos’ multimedia practice objects and disrupts culturally accepted stereotypes of toxic masculinity. Villalobos grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, in a traditional and religiously conservative family. His work reconciles identity challenges in his life, caught between traditional Mexican customs and American mores, and growing up with religious ideals that conflict with and condemn being gay.
About the Curator
Guest curator Erika Hirugami is part of the undoc+ spectrum, founder of CuratorLove, and co-founder of UNDOC+Collective, an autonomous justice-oriented initiative that empowers, advocates, supports, champions, produces, curates, exhibits, and aids in the creation of projects by individuals in the undoc+ spectrum and undocumented diaspora.
About the Laband Art Gallery
The Laband Art Gallery opened in 1984 at Loyola Marymount University with a generous gift from Walter and Francine Laband and is a key component of the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts. Located in the Fritz B. Burns Fine Arts Center, the gallery enhances the cultural life at LMU with rich programming and exhibitions that are open to the campus community and the public. Admission is free. The Laband is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. More information can be found at http://cfa.lmu.edu/labandgallery/.
About Loyola Marymount University
Loyola Marymount University is a top-ranked national university by U.S. News and World Report, which places LMU among the top six Jesuit universities in the country and in the top six private universities in California. Founded in 1911, LMU is a Catholic, Jesuit, and Marymount university with more than 7,100 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate and law students. LMU offers 56 undergraduate majors and 56 minor programs, along with 46 master’s degree programs, three doctorate programs and 12 credential/authorization programs. LMU’s intercollegiate athletics teams compete in the West Coast Conference with 14 Division I and varsity sports.
LMU news and events are found at: www.lmu.edu/news.