• Marcela Pardo Ariza

  • Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera

Workshop: Your Thriving Space

Programmed by Denise Kan

If you had a space or room of your own with no limitations, what would it contain? How would it look? Who would be there? Work with artists Marcela Pardo Ariza and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera to create your own surrealist tiny set by assembling images and text in a prebuilt fifteen-inch cube. Taking inspiration from the exhibition Strange, this workshop encourages participants to embrace the strange in creating a space of possibility.

Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, Marcela Pardo Ariza is a visual artist and curator who explores transhistorical and intergenerational kinship and alternate forms of representation while celebrating the erroneous through constructed photography, prop-like objects, and handmade bending frames and installations. Ariza is the recipient of the Tosa Studio Award and a Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and an Alternative Exposure grantee. Ariza holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a cofounder of Womxn Art Handlers and a member of the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.

Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera is a queer boricua visual communicator and educator. Rodríguez Rivera was born and raised in Cataño, the smallest town in Puerto Rico, but relocated to San Francisco in 2017. Rodríguez Rivera focuses on challenging colonial perspectives in design from the point of view of a boricua diaspora. Rodríguez Rivera is an assistant professor in the design department at California College of the Arts and holds an MFA in communications design from Pratt Institute in New York.