Art Lecture Series

The Evergreen State College

Tag: immigration

2/11, Week 6: Estefania Puerta

January 14, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Estefania Puerta‘s work delves into organic/inorganic materials to form new poetics of transformation and translation. She is interested in what is gained and lost in the process of making and the new worlds that can emerge from recontextualizing materials. Her practice is rooted in world making, shape shifting, border crossing, and language failure. Her research in psycho-analysis as it relates to the history of hysteria, natural medicine/folklore, and personal histories of immigration and undocumentation in the U.S. has led to questions around what is considered “natural” and “alien” in her materially diverse work. 

Puerta was recently awarded the 2024 Philip Guston Rome Prize. Her work has been recently exhibited at The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Nina Johnson Gallery, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, Lyles and King, and Micki Meng Gallery. She was included in the New England Triennial at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2022. Puerta received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2018. She was born in Colombia and currently lives and works between Vermont and New York.

Week 2, 04/09 Victor Yañez-Lazcano

April 2, 2025 /


Yañez-Lazcano’s work chronicles family history in the U.S. as it transitions from immigrants to Mexican Americans. Using large-format color portraits and still-life to re-imagine intergenerational narratives and push back on stereotypes, to-scale reproductions of colloquial family imagery address the poetic gaps and overlaps of collective memory. Further inspired by research in linguistics, Yañez-Lazcano creates sculptures and performances that engage with language ideologies. Embracing the element of repetition often found in manual labor, they collect, subtly transform, and compose discarded tools and materials related to immigrant labor in the U.S. 

Week 4: Rodrigo Valenzuela Wendesday, October 17th 2018, 11:30-1pm in Lecture Hall 1

June 15, 2021 /

from Rodrigo…

I construct narratives, scenes, and stories which point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. I utilize autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience. Gestures of alienation and displacement are both the aesthetic and subject of much of my work. Often using landscapes and tableaus with day laborers or myself, I explore the way an image is inhabited, and the way that spaces, objects and people are translated into images. My work serves as an expressive and intimate point of contact between the broader realms of subjectivity and political contingency. Through my videos and photographs, I make images that feel at the same time familiar yet distant. I engage the viewer in questions concerning the ways in which the formation and experience of each work is situated—how they exist in and out of place.

Jovencio de la Paz: Wednesday, April 20th, 11:30-1:00 pm in the 2nd floor Recital Hall of the COM Building

June 14, 2021 /
Jovencio de la Paz is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and textile. His work, which is committed to the ancient technologies and processes of textile, engages notions of identity, immigration, and the terrain of thought around human interaction with the landscape. Working with a range of materials, including indigo dye, traditional batik, textile printing, and multimedia strategies, Jovencio seeks to work in an expansive way, engaging highly specific materials and processes as sites to confront larger concerns of human migration and the narratives associated with such movement.
Jovencio was born in Singapore, and became a citizen of the United States in 1994. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Department of Fiber, in 2012. Recent solo and group exhibitions include shows at ThreeWalls, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; 4th Ward Projects, Chicago, IL; PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; SOIL Gallery, Seattle, WA; Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; MessHall, Chicago; Uri Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, among others. He regularly teaches at schools of art, craft, and design throughout the country, including the Ox Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI and the Arrowmont School of Craft in Tennessee. Jovencio de la Paz is Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon. He is also a co-founder of the collaborative group Craft Mystery Cult, established in 2010.
https://youtu.be/BquzYI4Fi1E

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