Art Lab x Markings

Join the Hammer Museum, AMBOS, and Heart of LA for a special Art Lab event featuring Markings project artist Jackie Amézquita.

This bilingual community workshop invites you to participate in a hands-on weaving activity rooted in techniques passed down through generations of Indigenous communities originating from pueblos originarios, cantones, and aldeas across Mexico and Central America. Inspired by the cultural fabric and traditional knowledge embedded in the Markings oral history and public project, lead artist Jackie Amézquita will guide participants through this interactive experience by sharing techniques, inspiration, and the stories behind this sustainable art form that recognizes handwork as a way of preserving ancestral memory.

Alongside the workshop, AMBOS will curate an interactive installation on natural dyes and weaving, offering a closer look at the materials and processes behind this practice. A curated playlist by the Central American Sound Archive (CASA) will set the tone for an afternoon of making, sharing, and connection. This program is organized in conjunction with the closing weekend of Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials. All ages welcome.

Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the ecological, ancestral, and cosmological dimensions of space, place, and temporality. For Amézquita, a site is a living constellation of human, elemental, and living systems—an evolving terrain where memory, matter, and energy circulate across deep time. Her work choreographs biomaterials as cosmological agents that carry ancestral knowledge across genealogies, informed by oral traditions rooted in Latin American epistemologies. She holds an AA in Visual Communications from LAVC, a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design, and an MFA from UCLA.

Markings / Huellas is a collaborative public art and oral history project that uplifts and preserves the stories and cultural heritage of the Indigenous diaspora in Westlake and Pico-Union, including Chinanteco, Maya K'iche', Maya Q'anjob'al, Maya Kaqchikel, Maya Yucateco, Mixe, Purépecha, and Zapotec families. The project gathers these intergenerational testimonios to inspire public art, programs, and exhibitions accessible through the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) digital collections — deepening the public's understanding of Westlake's history and honoring the people who continue to shape its present and future.

AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides is a femme-led binational artist collaborative that works along the U.S./Mexico border to build migrant support systems through craft, care, and mutual aid to advance pro-migrant narratives in the U.S. and Mexico. Founded in 2016 by the artist Tanya Aguiñiga to bring visibility to issues affecting the transnational population in Tijuana, the project has grown organically in scale and scope in response to a changing border landscape. In its various phases, AMBOS has supported documentation of the border, collaboration with artists, community activism, mutual aid, border and craft education, and an exploration of identities influenced by the liminal zone of the borderlands.

Heart of LA is a nonprofit community organization dedicated to supporting young people and families through free, high-quality programs in the arts, academics, and athletics. For over 35 years, HOLA has provided equitable access to arts education and enrichment for underserved youth in Los Angeles’ Westlake (Lafayette Park) neighborhood, with recent expansion into South Central Los Angeles. Heart of LA’s innovative Visual Arts Program offers weekly classes, field trips, guest artist workshops, artist residencies, and public art projects and programs.

The Central American Sound Archive, CASA, is a project dedicated to collecting and preserving sound recordings that promote the cultural knowledge of Central America; Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. Based in Los Angeles, where many diaspora live, CASA strives to contribute to cultural memory by visibilizing traditional and popular music, radio, and other sound expressions on both physical and digital formats. Currently, CASA founder Gabriel Vidal hosts a monthly internet radio show called Escuchar al Istmo on dublab.com every 2nd Sunday, 2-4PM, where community members share stories and music collections.