nAVIGATE
Artist Visits
Artists and art professionals connect with students both in and out of the classroom to share their work. Students learn first-hand from artists and arts professionals in the local arts community.
Students apply their learning in new environments including museums, art spaces, and studios.
Field Trips
PROGRAMMING
Programming for the Poet StoryLab focuses on personal narratives that celebrate the complexity, friction, and expansiveness of a “brown” identity in the United States. Featuring Experiential Learning Hendrix—a hallmark of the Whittier College curriculum – these programming opportunities actively engage students, connect classes to local communities, and bridge the classroom to professional opportunities in arts and culture. Programming includes:
Writers in residence
Visiting arts writers receive a stipend to support their independent work and bring their insights and perspectives to students through teaching a one-semester class in the Art & Visual Studies Department.
2025
Alejandra Fernandez
Artist Talk
Alejandra Fernandez is a Mexican artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work reflects her Mexican heritage, infusing each piece with vibrant color and sly humor, and is inspired by ancient Mesoamerican art and mythology and native plants and pollinators. Her practice deals with themes of community, feminism, and nature.
Fernandez graduated from Art Center College of Design in 2017 with a BFA with Honors in Illustration. Her freelance clients include The New York Times, WePresent, Birdhouse Skateboards, Theodore Payne Foundation, Compound Butter Magazine, and more. She has exhibited at Thinkspace Gallery, Theodore Payne Foundation, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, the Society of Illustrators, Hey There Projects, and Giant Robot gallery.
Hosted by Visiting Writer Eva Recinos, as part of her class, “Narrative, Creative Storytelling, and Brown Identities in the U.S.”
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In Spring 2025 Recinos will instruct ART 180/INTD 180: “Narrative, Creative Storytelling, and Brown Identities in the U.S.” This class will guide students to consider questions of “brownness” and its cultural and political antecedents. This class will be paying particular attention to a range of storytelling methods for interpreting and engaging with the natural world. By the end of the course, students are expected to be familiar with the basic methods of “close looking”; be able to engage in critical discussions about contemporary art and writing; and be familiar with a range of writers and artists of color working today. Students will gain an understanding of how to bring personal narrative and themes of cultural and personal identity into topics around plants, nature, walking, and the city.
Shizu Saldamando
Artist Talk
Shizu Saldamando is a Los Angeles based mixed media artist originally from San Francisco’s Mission district. Primarily concerned with portraiture and drawing, she experiments with a broad range of surfaces and materials from wood panels to bed sheets. Saldamando’s practice employs tattooing, video, painting and drawing on canvas, wood, paper, and cloth, and functions as celebration, and homage to peers and loved ones. Her mother’s family is Japanese American, by way of Boyle Heights/Sawtelle areas of L.A., and survivors of the Japanese American Internment camps. Her father is Chicano from Nogales, AZ. She received her B.A. from UCLA School of Art and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. She is currently represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.
Shizu Saldamando’s Artist Talk was hosted by Professor Danny Jauregui’s drawing class.
Vincent Price Art Museum
Field Trip
We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro is an exhibition, publication, and educational platform that directs dialogue and points of exchange among art, science, and environmental justice in the Americas. The project stems from the work of Los Angeles-based Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, whose art and research engage with the interrelated issues of water and land stewardship, food sovereignty, and fair and just energy transition.
Writer in Residence Eva Recinos led her class “Narrative, Creative Storytelling, and Brown Identities in the U.S.” to visit the Vincent Price Art Museum at East LA College for the exhibition We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro.
Eva Recinos
Writer in Resisdence
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and creative non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her reviews, features, and profiles have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, KCET, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Aperture, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Creative Independent and more. She was a 2019 nominee for the LA Press Club Awards in the category of Arts & Entertainment Feature (Online). Her essays have appeared in Refinery29, PANK, Blood Orange Review, Air/Light, Electric Literature and more. She recently attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Tin House Winter Workshop, in addition to completing a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
2024
MXCL BNL LAB
Field Trip
The MexiCali Biennial is a non-profit contemporary visual arts organization which focuses on the area encompassing California and Mexico as a region of aesthetic production. The organization is migratory in nature and showcases exhibitions on both sides of the California/Mexico border. The MexiCali Biennial was originally started as a project critiquing the proliferation of international and regional art biennials and as a result may be shown at any time and at any location.
Philomena Lopez Rivas led ART 122: "Art of the Americas" to visit the exhibition at MexiCali Biennale. Artist Isidro Pérez García led an artist talk at the exhibit.
Christina Fernandez
Artist Talk
Los Angeles-based artist Christina Fernandez (b. 1965) has spent over three decades conducting rich explorations of migration, labor, gender, her Mexican American identity, and the capacities of photography itself. She earned her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989 and her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1996. In 2021, Fernandez was one of the first artists honored with the prestigious Latinx Artist Fellowship, an initiative of the US Latinx Art Forum. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is the first major monographic museum exhibition of her work.
Professor Albers' class "Art in the Public Sphere" visited the "Multiple Exposures" exhibition at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, and her class "History of Photography" hosted the artist's talk.
Arlene Mejorado
Artist Talk
Arlene Mejorado is a lens-based artist from Los Angeles working with analog and digital photography, 16mm film, video, archives, zines, and mixed-media installations. Informed by her upbringing in a migrant household, Mejorado is interested in repair work, countering erasure and mending fragments in personal, collective, diasporic, and migration experiences within stories and narratives. Her adolescent experience navigating the San Fernando Valley’s mundane yet spectacularized movie-making landscape as well as her immersion in LA’s punk spaces and countercultural circuits fostered a critical vantage point that continues to influence her practice.
Arlene visited the class “Gender Studies in Photography, Art, and Visual Culture” to discuss how community care relates to her practice.
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Nikki Darling
Artist Talk
Nikki Darling holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. Her debut novel, Fade Into You, was published by Feminist Press in 2018. She is completing her second book, The Call Is Coming From Inside the House. According to Xochitl Bermejo writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books “In Fade Into You, Darling gives us more than an intimate view of a teenage girl; she gives us an intimate view of a young, mixed-race Chicana living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the kind of portrait that is nearly nonexistent in L.A. letters.”
Joining Raquel Gutierrez’s class, "Narrative, Creative Storytelling, and Brown Identities in the U.S.", writer Nikki Darling spoke with students about her recent book Fade into You.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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Field Trip
For the first time in her practice, Judy Baca transforms a museum into a studio. She and artists from the Social and Public Art Resource Center expand The Great Wall of Los Angeles into the 21st century, painting two sections of the mural at LACMA. LACMA’s exhibition presents murals from the 1960s depicting the Chicano Movement, Watts Renaissance, and archival materials that have never been exhibited, revealing Baca’s process and innovations to muralism.
Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine features Valdez’s oil painting on a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck portraying the forced removal of a predominantly Mexican American community for the construction of Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s. In 2004, Cooder invited Valdez to collaborate and create a painting to align with his album “Chavez Ravine” (2005), a musical interpretation of the neighborhood’s history.
Students visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and met with curatorial staff to learn about the exhibitions Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall and Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine.
Raquel Gutiérrez
Writer in Residence
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez's first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic. Brown Neon was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir, a Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firework Award in Creative Nonfiction and Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. A 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Gutiérrez gets to call Tucson, Arizona home.
Gutiérrez will instruct ART 180/INTD 180: “Narrative, Creative Storytelling, and Brown Identities in the U.S.” in the Spring 2024 semester.
2023
John Valadez
Muralist and pastel artist John Valadez grew up in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. While studying at East Los Angeles Junior College in the early 1970s, Valadez joined a theater group—performing in productions at the Mexican American Center for Creative Arts (MACCA)—and immersed himself in the study of art history and painting. He earned a B.F.A. from California State University at Long Beach in 1976. Following graduation, Valadez became involved in numerous mural projects in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work today.
This talk was hosted by Philomena Rivas Lopez, as part of her class, ART 371 : "Latinx Art and Visual Culture".
Artist Talk
Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture
Field Trip
Xican–a.o.x. Body weaves a rich tapestry of diverse media, from the late 1960s through today, including Lowrider cars, poetry, pottery, painting, photography, sculpture, and film. Xican–a.o.x. Body emerges at the intersection of vanguard artistic practices and the notion of Xicanisma, a vital and inclusive concept that developed in the 1990s out of the historical lineage of the 1960s Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Xicanisma amplifies the original Chicano calls for self-determination of ethnic, political, and cultural identity through greater acknowledgement of indigenous roots, intersectional identities, and feminism. The exhibition proudly includes the work of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Latinx, and Brown.
Students visited the exhibition Xican–a.o.x. Body at the new Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry of the Riverside Art Museum.