Please join us Saturday, August 12th for a summer block party in concert with the gallery’s summer exhibitions.
Live music, performances, and poetry readings by Edgar Fabián Frías, Vaughan Larsen, Marcel Monroy, Priestusssy, Cielo Saucedo, and Sammie Veeler. Food and drink vendors will be on site for purchase.
Edgar Fabián Frías is a multidisciplinary artist with a diverse skill set that spans various art forms, including installation, photography, video art, sound, sculpture, textiles, performance, and community organizing. Their work explores themes such as historical legacies, resilience, and radical imagination within the context of Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, and queer aesthetics. Frías was born in East Los Angeles in 1983 and received dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from UC Riverside. They later obtained an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling with a focus on Interpersonal Neurobiology and Somatic Psychotherapy from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. In 2022, Frías earned their MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley.
Vaughan Larsen received their BFA in Photography from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Later that year, they placed First in the Getty Images 2019 International Creative Bursary Award, first prize in the Amsterdam Pride Photo Award, and was named a 2019 Fellow by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary Nohl Fellowship. Their work has been shown throughout Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Pratt MWP’s campus gallery, and Europe. Their work has been written about in several publications, including Humble Arts Foundation. Larsen has presented at the Paul Brach Lecture Series at CalArts in 2021. They are now preparing their first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Marcel Monroy is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cellist. They currently live remotely in Northern California and are attending an MA program in Los Angeles.
Star Feliz/Priestusssy (b. 1992, Lenapehoking, New York, NY) is an artist and healer living and working on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Feliz illuminates the processes of world-building as they braid back together the strands of life within their Afro-Taino lineage of the Dominican Republic and the wider Caribbean diaspora that were so violently fragmented since the onset of European colonization. Working across media, their conceptual installations take the form of maps, songs, dimensions, and talismans. Through the exploration of the twinned histories of humanity and the earth, a unique visual lexicon emerges that embraces the mundane and the unknowable as sacred. Often functioning as wayfinding tools, these interventions bring an inter-dimensional perspective to the forefront and make manifest the transcendent possibilities between the scientific, the intuitive, and the fantastical. While investigating universal phenomena like loss and desire, they engage with the theoretical touchstones of feminist thought, the queer radical tradition, contemporary Black liberation movements and land rematriation. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music with the earth through intimate narratives of transformation.
Cielo Saucedo is an interdisciplinary artist and access worker. Their work focuses on the dispersal of ableism through cultural economies. They work to dissolve curative aspirations encoded in technology. Their practice hybridizes computer generated imagery, sculpture, writing and virtual reality. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and are currently an MFA candidate at UCLA.
Sammie Veeler is an artist based in Los Angeles whos work takes the shape of undulating loops in time playing out across performance, digital media, world building, and prose. Veeler seek to examine the spiritual and transformative power of personal and collective digital archives by connecting the personal practice of preserving her late husband’s personal data to the collective production of history online. Veeler is the co-founder and Gallery Director of New Art City.
Food by Kumpay Kitchen
Organized in collaboration with Star Feliz.