The Latinx Project : Histories We Carry

Option 3: 6-8 images with captions reflecting on the experience “Histories We Carry” Exhibit at The Latinx Project

1) Soñando con Ingapirca by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

This picture is made up of a collage of things trying to represent structures and showing “alien intervention”. We see how the artist is trying to represent the culture from Ecuador. We see similar things in the stories we have read in class where people still do things to preserve a little bit of their culture.

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2) Gag by Nicole Marroquin

In the “deep purple bile” that’s shaped as a speech scroll, we see multiple items. One of them that stood out was the nipple chillies that apparently “ speak a violent system of objectification and humanization.” When hearing America Ferrera’s speech, she talks a lot about how women are technically objectified and how people put all these standards on women. How we should do this, but cant do another thing at the same time. 

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3) Black Maiden (Daughter of the Copper Sun) by Morel Doucet

This was one of my favorite sculptures from the recollections gallery. But it mainly just reminded me of the chapter from “Hijas Americanas” called “The Latina Mystique”. There was a few pages that talked about hair and a lot of sections that talked about self image and how you view yourself and how sometimes you feel forced to care about other people’s perception about you.

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4) El Imperio en llamas: Monumento by Martin Wannam

I liked this collage simply because I thought it was very bright. But something else that stood out to me was that the brown part of the collage means “existing monuments as beacons of violent, oppressive histories, in relation to the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community” but all the open space represents space for reclamation. It reminded me a lot of “Spit and Passion” because there was a huge representation of the LGBTQ+ community. We saw how Christy wanted to be who she really was but at the same time she was afraid, and we saw how Green Day helped her to express her emotions and her feelings in a way that was comfortable for her. Eventually, we saw how little by little she was not caring how people felt about her in terms of that topic.

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5) Ventana de Luz by Estelle Maisonett

I was really proud of this picture that I took because I was able to get that one shadow which made it look extra cool in my opinion. But regardless, this collage of multiple different things such as “wood, acrylic, foam and fabric” shows the artist’s grandmother’s hands lowering down a bucket going into the street to exchange money and food items. She does this to pay homage to her abuelita. This reminded me of Lorena Kourousais, she doesn’t necessarily pay homage to anybody, but in her podcast, she does talk a lot about the Latino community and how she feels that we need to continue to work together. So doing things for the community the same way Estelle’s grandmother did for hers (selling food to her neighbors) is what I found similar to each other.

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6) In my Hood Series by Estelle Maisonett

These three steel air ducts that are made to look like three buildings in NY are to represent what some buildings looked like in 51 Madison Avenue before gentrification. Even though we haven’t read a specific story about gentrification, we have definitely mentioned it a lot in class discussions. Not only seeing how gentrification is killing the culture from New York, but it’s also making a lot of immigrant families leave from their living areas because it’s becoming too expensive.

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7) Tracing Roots by Estelle Maisonett

Even though this picture was quite different from anything that we have talked about in class, there are still small details from the picture. They were kind of important. it was out of the frame, but we saw how there was a candle with Guadalupe on it, we’ve talked a little bit about her in a few discussions, especially during the discussion that we had from the Hijas Americanas book.. the chapter “ in the name of the father.”