The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino hosts Vanessa Arizmendi, curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum, as she presents a a short and insightful discussion about artist Reynaldo Rivera, who was born in Mexico but spent his childhood traveling across the border and within the United States.
Arizmendi will present Rivera’s art on “Lunchtime Art Talk,” Wednesday, March 24, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.
Last year, between January and August, Rivera’s work was on display at The Huntington as well as at Hammer Museum, as part of Made in L.A. 2020: a version. He will again be featured in Made in LA 2021, which begins around mid-April.
Rivera was born in 1964 in Mexicali, Mexico. He grew up traveling throughout Mexico and the U.S. – mostly between San Diego de la Unión in Mexico, Los Angeles, and Stockton.
For Made in L.A. 2020, Rivera’s work included intimate photographs from clubs, bars, and house parties. His large body of work captures queer clubs in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s as well as house party scenes. Part of Rivera’s project is remembering and lending visibility to a whole community of vibrant trans-women and drag performers who often died young.
The project is also a representation of a Los Angeles that has all but disappeared: Echo Park as a predominantly Latinx neighborhood rife with artists, writers, and performers full of flare and queer glamour.
Rivera has been immersed in a community of interdisciplinary practitioners. In 1996, he was one of two photographers at the Chance Event, a sprawling three-day festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in the Nevada desert, conceived and produced by Chris Kraus. Rivera has exhibited his work at Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles in 2019, and has been published in Granta.
Last year, Semiotext(e) published a monograph of his work, “Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City,” which showed photographs that document a vanished LA of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, and underground bands, and long-closed gay and transvestite bars.
Vanessa Arizmendi started at the Hammer Museum in 2016, assisting with the Hammer’s PST LA/LA 2017 exhibition, “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985,” gathering high resolution images for publication, obtaining reproduction rights from artists and institutions, coordinating special performances, and maintaining an archive of media for the catalogue.
She went on to organize artist projects for Made in LA in 2018, became project coordinator, and started working as curatorial assistant that year.
“Lunchtime Art Talk” on Wednesday is free to attend but reservations are required.
To RSVP, visit www.huntington.org/events/
For more information, call (626) 405-2100.
