Guadalupe Rosales and Vivian Crockett

Aperture Foundation is pleased to present a night of conversation between artist Guadalupe Rosales and independent curator Vivian Crockett.

Since 2015, artist Guadalupe Rosales has been building an archive of vernacular photographs and ephemera connected to Latinx culture in Los Angeles. Her projects exist as both archives of physical objects and crowdsourced digital archives, assembled on her widely followed Instagram accounts (@veteranas_and_rucas and @map_pointz). Guided by an instinct to create counter narratives, Rosales tells the stories of communities often underrepresented in official archives and public memory.

A short reception will be held after the talk to celebrate Rosales’s exhibition, Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory. For this exhibition, which extends from a feature in Aperture’s Fall 2018 issue, “Los Angeles,” Rosales presents an installation of materials from her archives—from photobooth images of couples to young Chicanx women posing with cars to the party crews that ran East LA’s underground music scene in the 1990s.

Guadalupe Rosales is an artist and archivist based in Los Angeles. She is founder and operator of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz, digital archives accessible through Instagram. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, California; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. In 2016, Rosales took over the New Yorker’s social media for a week and was one of the top-rated takeovers of the year. Her subsequent role as the inaugural Instagram Artist in Residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Artsy, and Artforum. She has lectured at numerous museums and academic institutions, including the University of California, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; New York University; and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, among others. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.

Vivian Crockett is a New York–based independent researcher, scholar, and curator focusing largely on the art of African diasporas, (Afro)Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. She is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University whose dissertation examines artistic practices and discourses in Brazil in the sixties and seventies. Crockett was recently the 2017–18 Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture, Photographs in Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, Los Angeles, 2018

Generous support for Legends Never Die: A Collective Memory, installation by Guadalupe Rosales, is provided by the MurthyNAYAK Foundation. Lead funding for the “Los Angeles” issue of Aperture magazine is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Further generous support for public programs is provided by the Aperture Board of Trustees, Members, and other individuals, in addition to grants from foundations, including The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.