No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt): A Performance and Conversation with Elia Arce

Elia Arce is an artist working in a wide variety of media, including installation, performance, experimental theater, writing, photo, video, sculptural performance, and social sculpture. She is the winner of the J. Paul Getty Award, Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network National Endowment Fund Award, Durfee Individual Artist Award and was nominated for the Herb Alpert / CalArts Award in Theater. Arce also received an award from the Ford Foundation, where she developed a proposal for a new social sculpture project entitled Gulf Coast Art Corridor. In 2010, she received a Fulbright scholarship to teach a semester of Performance Art at the Theater School of the National University of Costa Rica. She has taught at different universities in the United States and Costa Rica and has taught performance workshops in Mexico, Brazil, Mali, Spain, Cuba, and Canada. Arce is the founder and artistic director of USEKRA: Center for Creative Investigation on the Caribbean area of Costa Rica, where artists, academics, anthropologists, sociologists, biologists and other international thinkers meet to challenge perspectives and create work that questions existing standards from Indigenous, Afro-descendant and/or Asian perspectives––cultures that are the pillars of the Talamanca region.

Jackie Amezquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationships between land, memory, and identity across genealogies. Her practice is channeled through the fuse of biomaterials such as earth, masa, charcoal, and rain, treating them as active carriers of ancestral knowledge. Through installations, performances, and sculptures, Amézquita engages the ecological and spiritual dimensions of place, emphasizing impermanence, transformation, and interdependence among human and more-than-human worlds. Her work further explores movement, collective memory, adaptation, and regeneration, centering the transformative power of interconnection. Amézquita received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022 and her BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, in 2018. She has exhibited with the Hammer Museum, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), 18th St Art Center, the Armory Center of the Arts, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Annenberg Space for Photography, Human Resources Los Angeles, and MAD (Museum of Art and Design) NY. Amézquita is the recipient of the Mohn Public Recognition Award (2023), Mohn Land Award (2023), Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Los Angeles Art Fund (2022), and National Performance Network Fund (2022). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum and Denver Art Museum. She has been featured in Art in America, Cultured, Flaunt, whitewall, Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, and Walker Art Center Magazine. Amézquita exhibited in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made In LA 2023 - Acts of Living exhibition where her epic piece El suelo de nos alimenta consisting of 144 framed soil paintings won the Mohn Public Recognition Award and entered the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum.

Jasmine Magaña is a research specialist at the Getty Research Institute working with the Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative (LALAI). Her research interests span the field of contemporary art in the Americas, with particular attention to the evolution of concepts of public art and art in public space, performance, and socially engaged art since the 1970s, as well as artist-led collaborative projects in the urban centers of San Salvador, Bogotá, and Los Angeles. Previously, she has worked in curatorial and education departments at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California. She holds an MA in Art History & Visual Studies from Duke, an MA in Art History & Theory from the University of Essex, and a BA from Seattle University.