21c Salon: Documenting the Immigrant Experience

21c Museum Hotel Kansas City, in partnership with Charlotte Street Foundation, presents 21c Salon: Documenting the Immigrant Experience. A panel of 4 Latinx artists, Jose Faus, Israel Alejandro Garcia Garcia, Patricia Bordallo Dibildox, and Rebeka Pech Moguel will discuss their experience with immigration and border issues and how this manifests in their work.

PARTICIPANTS
Jose Faus – Moderator
Jose Faus is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer who came to Kansas City from Bogota, Columbia, as a child. Faus is a founding member of the Latino Writers Collective, sits on the boards of the UMKC Friends of the Library and the Charlotte Street Foundation and is board president of The Writer’s Place. His first chapbook, This Town Like That, was published in 2015, and his full-length book of poetry, The Life and Times of Jose Calderon, will be published soon.

Israel Alejandro Garcia Garcia
As Creative Director/Curator of a contemporary art gallery focused on Latin American narratives and as an artist himself, Israel Alejandro Garcia Garcia will be joining us to discuss his current research, development, and implementation of a complex exhibition titled Bordes Carnosos / Border Carnage ‘MoLCA’. This project will be an evolving, traveling exhibit documenting the immigrant experience, including archival histories from three KC Latinx neighborhoods which have inevitable, painful ties to the borderlands of today (Westside and Northeast KCMO, and Argentine/Wyandotte KCK). His exhibitions have always served both local and national communities, and his own artwork has documented a personal and collective cultural history. As a new citizen, he feels the need to explore issues that were once paralyzing barriers to his own studio/curatorial practice. Having survived crossing the border as a child, he found sanctuary in a safe place. Today he is taking up the burden of sharing the narratives of those who did not survive.

Patricia Bordallo Dibildox
Patricia Bordallo Dibildox is a Mexican-born artist and arts administrator residing in Kansas City, MO. Originally from San Luis Potosí, Bordallo Dibildox moved to KC in 2002. Following her graduation from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015, Bordallo Dibildox interned at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy for three months. She currently has a studio residency at The Drugstore where she was awarded a free residency through the Gift of Faith Award. Bordallo Dibildox is also a founding leader of the Artists of Color Alliance (KC), a partner of Sight Review (SF), and was the recipient of a 2015 Charlotte Street Foundation Rocket Grant as Senior Editor of Informality Blog (KC). Her work has been displayed nationally and internationally in Australia.

In addition to her studio practice, Bordallo Dibildox works at the Continuing Education department at the Kansas City Art Institute as Youth + High School Program Specialist. She is Co-Director of Front/Space, a storefront apartment located in the heart of downtown Kansas City repurposed for non-commercial exhibitions, installations, readings, screenings, concerts, workshops, forums, research & publishing projects.

Rebeka Pech Moguel
Rebeka Pech Moguel is a Kansas City-based artist currently completing a BFA in photography and art history degree at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is a lens-based artist but also works with other mediums. Rebeka’s work explores a variety of topics ranging from visual perception to more personal subjects concerning cultural and past experiences. She explores topics of personal and cultural identity and appropriation of her own culture through self-portraiture. Having grown up caught between two cultures and being seen as an “other” by both, Rebeka is interested in the discussion that is created through the appropriation of symbols that are often associated with Mexican and Latino culture in general.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET FOUNDATION
CSF identifies the needs and fuels the evolution of an ever-changing multidisciplinary arts ecosystem. They provide annual cash awards, project-based grants, free studios, performance and exhibition spaces while also engaging national philanthropic and cultural leaders with Kansas City artists and the arts community.