Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory

Overview

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 crowd sourced digital archives, assembled on her widely followed Instagram accounts: Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz. Guided by an instinct to create counternarratives, Rosales tells the stories of communities often underrepresented in official archives and public memory.

Rosales views her work as a way of decriminalizing and reframing the history of brown youth, as well as connecting and reconstituting community. “I was always attracted to photographs not just for their images, but also for the notes written on the back. They were like relics; they reconnected me.” 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.

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.

About the Artist

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.