In May 2024, ALA presented its inaugural exhibition, Act I: The Showcase, featuring seven emerging artists: Gabriela Agreda, Jonathan Carela, Laura Castro, Gustavo Ghavami, Andrea Grau, Victoria Martinez,and Luca Otamendi.
Curated by Ala founder Amanda Garcia, Act I aimed to illuminate the array of artists, styles, mediums, and conceptual approaches that ALA will feature in its exhibitions. Here, we showcase works by emerging and mid-career artists who explore myriad themes, from Laura’s examination and reconstruction of identity, memories, and relationships erased by colonialism in the Dominican Republic; to Gustavo’s admiration for manual labor, its associated agency and power to transform our surroundings; to Victoria paying homage to her Mexican-American heritage through textile-based, public art-inspired installations.
Displayed in various formats, from Jonathan’s collage paintings on paper and maximalist works on canvas, to Gabriela's experimentation with cement, oil painting, and photography, each artist brings a unique perspective and materiality to their work.
Andrea explores printing and pigments on jacquard woven textiles, while Luca integrates graphic design elements and materials to depict his memories through sounds on canvas.
This initial exhibition underlined the breadth of themes and inquiries being championed by this generation of emerging artists, whether based in the US or their home countries.
Being Latin American, we are united by commonalities such as language – albeit with completely distinct tonalities, words, expressions, degrees of fluency or bilingualism – but our histories (colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial), struggles, challenges, opportunities, are diverse and vary widely.
ALA endeavors to provide a platform to showcase our talent, but also our individual experiences, contributions, depictions, and questioning, painting a more contemporary and nuanced portrayal of Latin America and its diaspora today.
To view available works from this exhibit, visit the Collect page.
