FUTURE RELICS: Artifacts for a New World

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and GULCH Collective are proud to present FUTURE RELICS: Artifacts for a New World, a powerful presentation by a new generation of Latinx artists who are bringing performance and the visual arts together to challenge the inequitable relationship between Eurocentric museum practices and artifacts looted from colonized societies in the Americas.

As cultural institutions like the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art begin the process of reevaluating their Latin American collections, we look to artists to show us possible avenues of transfiguration. Who will interpret these objects in the future? What will survive to tell our stories? FUTURE RELICS will develop in three phases over a period of eleven months, each phase building on the one before. The artists will create their own systems of analytical, whimsical, and absurd responses to objects selected from the Marjorie Barrick’s pre-Columbian collection, questioning notions of “the exotic” and “the authentic” as they seek to extend the transformation of our present world from within the museum outwards.

Support for this exhibition is provided by the WESTAF Regional Arts Resilience Fund, a relief grant developed in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support arts organizations in the 13-state western region during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional programs are funded in part with support from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

FUTURE RELICS: Artifacts for a New World will be installed in the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s West Gallery from September 28, 2020 - August 27, 2021. Phase one features work by Sinai Basua, Adriana Chavez, Dan Hernandez, Homero Hidalgo, Cesar Piedra, and Miguel Rodriguez.

Phase 2

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and GULCH Collective are proud to present Phase 2 of FUTURE RELICS: Artifacts for a New World, a presentation by a new generation of Latinx and Indigenous artists who are bringing performance and the visual arts together to challenge the inequitable relationship between Eurocentric museum practices and artifacts looted from colonized societies in Central and South America.

Anyone who has visited the exhibition since it opened with Phase 1 on September 28, 2020, will have already enjoyed a range of painting, sculpture, collage, and performance that includes Dan Hernandez’s ex voto lunchboxes, the deliberate cuteness of Cesar Piedra’s contemporary Colima puppy, Miguel Rodriguez’s memories of his early life in Panama, and Geovany Uranda’s striking mural of nested masks.

Visitors who came to the Museum during one of Adriana Chavez’s periodic performances might have seen the actor dressed in Christmas robes or singing karaoke as she conjured up an ever- changing installation of toys, bottles, flowers, and golden stones in the center of the gallery floor. Phase 2 expands the exhibition with new work by Karla Lagunas, Emmanuel Muñoz, Joey Silva, and the Southern Paiute artist Fawn Douglas. Some of the Phase 1 artists will also return to develop their original installations with new perspectives and materials. Phase 2 opens on Friday, January 29th, 2021.

Phase 3

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and GULCH Collective are proud to present Phase 3 of FUTURE RELICS: Artifacts for a New World, a presentation by a new generation of Latinx and Indigenous artists who are bringing performance and the visual arts together to challenge the inequitable relationship between Eurocentric museum practices and artifacts looted from colonized societies in Central and South America.

Phase 3 further expands the exhibition with new works by Zully Mejia and Jacqueline Pichardo, as well as new additions by Phase 1 and 2 artists Dan Hernandez and Cesar Piedra. Artist Adriana Chavez also continues her performances that alter her installation piece.

Follow the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and GULCH on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for future updates.

About GULCH
GULCH is an intersectional artist collective based in Las Vegas that supports arts projects, champions artists, and strives to amplify the voices and ideas of marginalized communities through: Curated exhibitions, projects, workshops, performances, and critical dialogue. The GULCH collective organizers are Justin Favela, Jennifer Kleven, Quindo Miller, Krystal Ramirez, Lance L. Smith, and Mikayla Whitmore. More information about GULCH can be found on Instagram @gulchcollective.

THE ARTISTS
Sinai Basua is a queer visual artist based in Las Vegas. As a first-generation American born in Los Angeles and raised in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico they explore the concepts of (sub)culture, expectations placed upon the working class, and the constructs of gender, race, and queer identity with an influence of daydreams. Their work was featured in the Queer Arts Film Festival Las Vegas and continue to split their time between art department work on various sets throughout the West Coast while directing an ongoing docu-series This Is How We Live.

Adriana Chavez is a queer interdisciplinary performer, director, educator, and image-maker who strives to embody diverse perspectives of the human condition through her work. She has worked with the NYC Clown Theater Festival, the Naked Empire Bouffon Company, CA/MA, Shakespeare & Company, MA, and with many institutions across Nevada, including Majestic Repertory Theatre, Las Vegas Theatre Company, A Public Fit, Meow Wolf and participated in the Inaugural Bullfrog Biennal at the Goldwell Open Air Museum. Chavez holds an MFA in Ensemble-based Physical Theatre from Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. She is based in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Fawn Douglas is an Indigenous American artist and enrolled member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe. She also has roots in the Moapa Paiute, Southern Cheyenne, Creek and Pawnee tribes. She is dedicated to the intersections of art, activism, community, education, culture, identity, place and sovereignty. Within her art-making and activism, she tells stories in order to remember the past and also to ensure that the stories of Indigenous peoples are heard in the present. Her studio practice includes painting, weaving, sculpture, performance, activist art and humor. She is currently working on her Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Through the MFA program, she serves as a graduate assistant and co-curates with an artist team, the Vegas Institute for Contemporary Engagement (V.I.C.E), which has been the catalyst for exhibitions, podcasts, interviews, performances and experimentation that makes space for marginalized artists in the Las Vegas community.

Dan Hernandez creates mixed media artworks that aim to remind us of the persistence of childhood nostalgia through whimsical references to cartoons, toys, movies, cassette tapes, pizza slices, Coke, and cupcakes. Growing up in a peripatetic, low-income military family, he saw how intense memories can attach themselves to cheap, transportable pop culture objects, such as Pez dispensers and comic books. His work is informed by his awareness of the emotional weight of these mass-market products. His gallery installations consider the different social and environmental forces that shape our self-perception. Based in Las Vegas, he has exhibited in Nevada and California. He is the creator of SOCIAL COMA zine and a core member of the Las Vegas street art collective Cult 33. His wood sculptures have appeared quietly in urban environments across the Northwest.

Homero Hildalgo was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1980 and migrated to the U.S. in 1995. Having lived in Miami he then completed a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and has recently obtained an MFA at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Homero explores Painting's unique properties and illusory characteristics: Color, whether moody, powerful or material is made to wander through various systems that aim at improvisation; often projecting movies onto canvases to create all-over compositions that expand on abstract expressionist traditions. His early work is included in private collections such as the Denver Art Museum, the Snite Museum of Art in Notre Dame IN and he has been featured in international exhibits such as Pach Pan in 2019 at DiabloRosso gallery in Panama City, Panama.

Karla Lagunas: A 2017 graduate of Art and Art History from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Karla Lagunas is a multi-disciplinary artist whose investigations guide her to a medium. Her performance work utilizes the inescapability of her brown and female body as a lightning rod for intersections of gender, sexuality, race, immigration, class and neurodivergence. Her visual art often employs these themes with the use of dialectics and metaphors through subject and through material. Her paintings activate portraiture into reactive installations, often pushing painting to a sculptural realm, exploring the limits of art objects. She is driven by activating curiosity and exploring how our built reality is a series of choices made in the distant past and perpetuated into the future.
A Las Vegas native, Karla’s work has shown locally in several exhibition spaces including UNLV galleries and Clark County libraries. In 2020, she exhibited work for the national show SKIN IN THE GAME at Palo Verdes Art Center in California. She has performed experimental collaborative work for local theater companies and is co-organizer of the non-hierarchical performance art event RADAR.

Emmanuel Muñoz is a student of architecture and art history born in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Most of his time is spent uncovering the ways art touches the individual and collective experience of the people around him. He makes art using the most proximate materials and tools available, often a simple pencil and sketchbook, to produce drawings and collages about everyday life. He is currently living somewhere in North Las Vegas, Nevada, working from his bedroom late into the night. He is an educational outreach assistant and co-captain at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at UNLV.

Zully Mejia is a painter and sculptor who aims to expand the definition of femininity beyond stereotypical portrayals. In her practice, she engages with themes of diversity, perception, and empowerment through the depiction of minority female identities and artifacts that challenge conventional gender norms. Mejia is a Peruvian American artist based in Las Vegas. She attained her BFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Spain. Her portrait painting America is currently on loan from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art to Congresswoman Susie Lee’s office in the U.S. Capitol.

Jacqueline Pichardo is a Las Vegas-based freelance visual development artist specializing in storyboarding and narrative illustration. She uses her personal art practice to explore the meaning of identity as it relates to nationality and race. Jacqueline holds a BFA in painting from Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis.

Cesar Piedra is an interdisciplinary visual artist working in sculpture, ceramics, and performance. His work addresses issues of identity from a Mexican-American perspective, employing historical iconography, cultural hybridity, and naturalism to illustrate the experience of living between cultures and history. Piedra has exhibited at galleries in Carson City, Reno, and Yerington, NV. Born and raised in Southern California, he currently lives in Reno.

Miguel Rodriguez was born in Wichita KS and grew up in Leavenworth KS, alongside the Missouri River, surrounded by green vistas, big skies, old homes, and farms. His mother, a 5th generation Kansan, and his father, an Afro-Puerto Rican with roots on the island that go back to the late 1700s, were brought together by the American Military. In 2000, he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute then moved to Las Vegas in 2001 to pursue his Masters of Fine Arts from UNLV. Working predominantly in ceramics, sculpture, and large scale murals, his colorful and dynamic work draws inspiration from science, popular culture, and current events. He currently teaches Ceramics and 3D Design at UNLV.

Joey Silva focuses on the delicate framework of his subject matter in the throws of vertigo. A tug-of-war between dueling natures orbiting around trauma, sexuality, alcoholism, and loss of cultural identity. The weight of line work is of high concentration as well as collaging media that meld in a way to both compete and compliment each other as a full body of work. Joey Silva is a member of the Navajo tribe transplanted to Las Vegas for an
education in the fine arts program at UNLV. He tethers his culture and sexuality into his work as an extension of his experience living in two radically different and opposing spheres.

Geovany Uranda. Born in 1993 in San Gabriel, California and raised in Las Vegas by his mother and her family, Geovany Uranda has long been a member of the Southern Nevada arts scene. A career in music gave way to his interest in becoming a self-taught graphic designer, creating flyers for all sorts of shows and events. As an artist, he has explored mediums such as photography, sculpture, and print. He has participated in group exhibitions and collaborated on numerous projects including the recent design of “The ABCs of Latindad Coloring Book” for the podcast Latinos Who Lunch."

Digital Catalog for "Future Relics" on Issuu

Press Release for "Future Relics"

"Artist Adriana Chavez Explores Themes That Are Local and Global to the Latinx Experience" by Dr. Erika Abad for Latinx Spaces

"The Gulch Collective considers how Vegas life will be perceived tomorrow, and how museums present history today" by Leslie Ventura for Las Vegas Weekly