The Sam Francis Gallery at

Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences Presents

After the Smoke Has Cleared: Constructing Community through Chaos

Artists: ISABEL AVILA, MARIA DE LOS ANGELES, DIANA-SOFIA ESTRADA, STEPHANIE GUERRERO, PATRICIA VALENCIA

Guest Curator: VINCENT RAMOS

Exhibition: Oct. 27-Nov. 18, 2021 (Click HERE for visitor protocol)

In 2017, Crossroads Visual Arts faculty member, Vincent Ramos organized an exhibition entitled Neighborhood Watch for Woodbury University’s Nan Rae Gallery. The show looked at various ways that artists considered the idea of community within their practice at that moment in time and specifically through a Chicanx/Latinx lens. It opened the day of the first Women’s March and the day after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. Four years later, Ramos is reconsidering this concept, from the aftermath of that initial period to everything that has occurred since.

After the Smoke Has Cleared: Constructing Community through Chaos includes the work of Isabel Avila, Maria De Los Angeles, Diana-Sofia Estrada, Stephanie Guerrero, and Patricia Valencia. Through their individual work, these artists have continually examined larger notions of community via archives, history, personal experience, language, performance, research, and site-specificity. The work within the show will highlight these numerous directions through the mediums of photography, painting, drawing, and film/video to promote a cross-disciplinary dialogue between the five artists, their respective work, and the larger community of Crossroads.

About Vincent Ramos:

Vincent Ramos (b.1973, Santa Monica, CA) received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA (2002) and his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2007). Exhibitions include A Universal History of Infamy, LACMA, Los Angeles (2017); The Parable of Arable Land, If I Had a Hammer, The Wilhelm Scream, Conduit, Dallas (2015); Plum Pudding Peanut Island (Gilligan’s Squaw Fire Island II), Elephant, Los Angeles (2013), In the Good Name of the Company, See Me Gallery, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum and LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship (2019); Friends of Contemporary Art Mid-Career Fellowship (2015); Legacy Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, 18th Street Arts Center (2011); and the California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship (2010). His most recent installation debuted in early 2020 at Frieze LA at Paramount Studios.