Guadalupe Rosales

Guadalupe Rosales's practice is rooted in the preservation of cultural memory, and she preserves archives, records, and projects that bear witness to the breadth of Los Angeles culture. As part of an ongoing digital project, Rosales has created two publicly accessible archives on Instagram, @veteranas_and_rucas and @map_pointz. Drawn from images contributed by people throughout Los Angeles and beyond, these accounts feature family photographs, pictures of social gatherings, and ephemera from raves and parties. Rosales builds these personal and subcultural artifacts into a powerful portrait of community, bringing personal and collective histories into the present.

Hybridity is an important concept for her practice, both as a way of thinking about the complexities of identity and as an acknowledgment of the different meanings that can be contained in singular objects, artworks, and spaces. This is reflected in the way she transforms existing materials and symbols, opening up seemingly familiar things to allow for new interpretations. Through these objects, Rosales destabilizes fixed ideas of culture and gives voice to the intimacies of queer and familial lived experience, allowing ancestral knowledge, personal memory, and contemporary existence to sit side by side. 

Guadalupe Rosales (b. 1980, Los Angeles) received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021); Dallas Museum of Art (2021); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (2020); Gordon Parks Foundation, New York (2019); and Aperture Foundation, New York (2018). Group exhibition venues include the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); The Kitchen, New York (2019); and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2017). She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship (2020), Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2019). She has been an artist-in-residence at Denniston Hill (2022), PAOS: Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco (2020), Main Museum (2018), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017). In 2023 she is publishing a book with One World, Penguin Random House.