Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am a queer Latina artist born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District. My works are steeped in film performance, visual culture, and storytelling. I have worked to archive, curate, reinterpret, and re-historicize Latino/a culture in the Mission for broad audiences in order to stake out complex stories of the Mission in the city’s memory and history. My multimedia projects often include archival footage, photographs, interviews, storytelling, and film. I want to preserve, disseminate, and reinterpret the era  when this neighborhood was majority Latino and working class. I am also interested in the ways my queerness and racial identities intersect and collide; I want to play with these intersections and collisions through visual and media works that can cross-pollinate audiences. My media and performance projects have drawn large crowds, awards, community support, and critical acclaim. During the Mission’s current wave of aggressive gentrification, my works evoke a very different past neighborhood that is disappearing.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands, I will be working on developing the project Hood Girls in collaboration with artist Shizu Saldamando.

Hood Girls pays homage to drag queens and trans women who performed on 16th Street in San Francisco’s Mission district in the 1980s and 90s in bars that have since disappeared: Esta Noche, La India Bonita, and Los Portales.

Images of these Latina drag queens, who are and were from San Francisco’s Mission District— Ronnie Salazar, Teresita La Campesita, Mahogany, and other Queens—will be engraved on the hoods of lowrider rides, like that 64 Impala, in custom paint jobs. Together we will collaborate and experiment with materials to design these lowrider hood replicas.

Artist headshot: Kari Orvick