The Craft in America Center (8415 W. Third St., LA 90048) offers a new exhibition during gallery hours (Tuesday-Saturday, 12-6pm).  CALL Prior to visiting. It includes the work of four artists and will remain on view thru May 2, 2020. The artists explore issues of gender, race, culture, and place, offering true expressions of their experience in this world. Cristina Córdova, Wendy Maruyama, Cara Romero, and Diego Romero draw upon their heritages and identities as makers to translate their experiences into fine art.

Wendy Maruyama, furniture maker, educator and United States Artists Fellow 2020, delves into matters of ethnicity, gender, and world issues in her studio in San Diego, CA.  Born an American of Japanese heritage, Maruyama satisfied her artistic passions by becoming an important furniture maker in a field dominated by men, and in the process, overcame challenges related to her deafness and disability. Maruyama is able to translate her complex identity into beautiful yet challenging work.

Cristina Córdova is a sculptor who is originally from Puerto Rico and now lives and works at Penland, NC. Her beautiful figurative clay work is rooted in renaissance sculptural traditions and ceramic history. Each piece represents our shared humanity while confronting contemporary issues of gender, race, beauty, and power.

Diego Romero is a potter living and working in Santa Fe, NM and a member of the Cochiti Pueblo tribe. He makes art that transcends his Native American heritage by combining traditional materials, techniques, and forms of ancient Mimbres, Anasazi, and Greek pottery with comic book inspired imagery to talk about contemporary issues. Romero is a self-proclaimed “chronologist on the absurdity of human nature,” whose comic narratives often venture into taboo areas of politics, environment, racism, alcoholism, love, life, and loss.

Cara Romero, a contemporary photographer and member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe of the Chemehuevi Reservation (a branch of the Southern Paiute) of the Mojave Desert, CA. She is a passionate spokesperson for indigenous cultural and environmental issues. Her complex and nuanced images combine traditional iconography with a contemporary perspective-bringing past, present, and future into consideration. The artist orchestrates a balancing act in her photography by rewriting stories of Indian identity, battling cultural misappropriation, and confronting stereotypes-particularly of Native women-all the while preserving tradition and maintaining cultural sensitivity.

On view: March 14 – May 2, 2020

Where: Craft in America Center, 8415 W. Third St., LA, 90048
Phone: (323) 951-0610 – CALL Prior to visiting.
Website: https://www.craftinamerica.org/center