The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced that Los Angeles–based artist and archivist Guadalupe Rosales was selected as its first-ever Instagram artist in residence.
Rosales started Veteranas and Rucas (@veteranas_and_rucas) and Map Pointz (@map-pointz), both digital archives found on Instagram. She is working on an ongoing project of developing an archive of photographs, objects, and ephemera related to the 1990s Los Angeles Latinx party scene. Rosales has lectured at various institutions, including UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, the New Museum, the Vincent Price Art Museum, New York University, and the Graduate Center in New York, among others.
Rita Gonzalez, curator and acting head of contemporary art at LACMA, said, “What struck us about Rosales’s approach is her use of Instagram in an expanded sense. She thinks about the platform in the way that curators and artists use research to approach their work, and highlights the different ways of telling stories visually, drawing out people’s experiences in a narrative way.”
Rosales said that she will use LACMA’s Instagram to connect with people about art in Los Angeles. “I want to have conversations about art with people from different backgrounds, and Instagram is an ideal place for that,” she said. “It’s where we will all intersect and have dialogue around artworks inside and outside of museums.”
According to the artist, LACMA director Michael Govan first discovered Rosales’s work at an exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, which led to brainstorming about how to use LACMA’s social media platforms for artists. “The piece I had in the exhibition was a silent video of screen grabs from Veteranas and Rucas,” Rosales said. “There were about fifty images looping. Each image stayed up for about one minute, long enough for the viewer to read the comments below the images. I added the comment sections as a way to give voice or humanize the photographs because I wanted the audience to understand that people’s stories and photos are important and I wanted to honor that.”