Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, installation
Website: marcelpardoariza.com
Marcel Pardo Ariza (they/he) was born in 1991 in Bogotá, Colombia, and lives and works in Oakland, California. They are a trans visual artist, educator, and curator. They received their education in San Francisco — studying at the San Francisco Art Institute before building their practice in the Bay Area — and went on to co-found Art Handlxrs, a collective addressing labor equity in art handling, and to serve on the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure. They are a studio member at Minnesota Street Project and have taught at multiple Bay Area institutions.
They are a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner, the 2021 CAC Established Artists Award recipient, the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award recipient, and a 2017 Tosa Studio Award recipient. Their work has been exhibited at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Lisson Gallery New York, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, YBCA, the ICA San José, and SFMOMA.
Pardo Ariza works in constructed photography, site-specific installation, and public programming, exploring the relationship between representation, queer and trans kinship, and intergenerational connection. Their practice is rooted in close collaboration with trans, non-binary, and queer friends and peers — performers, artists, educators, policymakers, and community organizers — whose lives and voices are both the subject and co-authors of the work. Their photographs are staged rather than documentary: elaborate sets assembled as sites of possibility, where alternative present and future narratives for trans and queer communities can be realized. Post-camera, they push against the arbitrary constraints of photography discourse, treating the medium as plastic and expansive rather than transparent. Their most significant institutional work, I Am Very Lucky, Very Lucky to Be Trans, presented at SFMOMA's 2022 SECA exhibition, took the form of a large-scale photo montage borrowing the form of Renaissance religious polyptychs to celebrate trans leadership.
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