Relational Practices in Chicano/Latino Art Spaces: Reflections on Curating, Archives, and Community

July 7, 2025

Entering the Vincent Price Art Museum this past summer as a Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern was daunting at first, due to my limited technical background in the arts and art history. Before this internship, my artistic involvement was primarily focused on curating Spotify playlists and developing my lens-based art practice. 

Despite my initial apprehension, art and creative expression have always been central to my coursework and research interests. Through various on-campus roles at Scripps College, I led art activities to promote wellness and researched how cultural practices like music and cooking serve as creative expressions that sustain community care and resistance. These experiences were guided by my professors, Artivista Dr. Martha Gonzalez and Dr. Gabriela Morales, who have continued to support me professionally. They inspired me to apply to VPAM because of its long-standing history of centering communities of color, particularly Chicanx/Latinx communities. 

This blog post introduces the range of curatorial research and activities that I completed over the summer, and includes several reflections that I had throughout my ten-week full-time internship.

On Positionality

As an emerging museum professional with a background in Anthropology and Chicanx/Latinx Studies, I examine power dynamics and positionalities in institutional spaces through a critical lens. This perspective has shaped my vision of museums as accessible and inclusive spaces for knowledge production. I am also deeply aware of the ethics of care and representation, which provided me with transferable skills to personalize my scholarship at VPAM. I am passionate about challenging the Euro-American objectivity traditionally expected in academia and art spaces. With this in mind, I approached the internship with guiding questions such as:

How does personalizing scholarship create space for intimate stories to be told and documented, contributing to individual and collective well-being?

• How are practices of care reflected in exhibitions and archives?
• In what ways do archives capture the intentions, delivery, and final outcomes of exhibitions?
• How do these projects engage, represent, and empower the communities they aim to serve?
• When did I feel most connected to or excited about the museum archives?
• How do individuals seek affirmation or representation in institutional spaces to establish a sense of belonging?

These spaces are vital for uplifting communities and fostering both individual and collective well-being. During my internship, I applied my understanding of community activism and the socio-political factors influencing creative expressions in underrepresented communities, while also enhancing my ability to articulate creative and curatorial choices. 

In the paragraphs that follow, I will discuss my main projects at VPAM, such as supporting the exhibition We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro—an art and environmental justice project centered on artist Carolina Caycedo that is part of the Getty initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide—and the Chicano Exhibition Archive Project, which aimed to research and catalog over 50 years of the museum’s records related to Chicano Art.