On her two popular Instagram accounts, Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz, Guadalupe Rosales has been chronicling Latinx youth culture in Southern California, beginning with her own snapshots from growing up in L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood and growing to include crowd-sourced images and ephemera. These Instagram accounts are a way for the artist to create an official archive of sorts for cultures and communities that are underrepresented or ignored by more formal institutional archives.
Last year, Rosales moved her work from phone screens to the gallery walls at Aperture in New York, gathering an installation of materials from her archives. (That exhibit extended from a feature in Aperture magazine’s fall 2018 issue on Los Angeles.) And on January 25, the resulting exhibition, Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory, opened at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.
Bathed in black light (to reference lighting in a club), the gallery showcases large blown-up snapshots on the walls and via projections—couples posed in photobooths, pictures of pictures displayed at home in frames or in stacks of prints, women in jeans posing by their cars or with their friends—and display cases of additional photographs and flyers telling the stories of East L.A.’s Latinx communities from their parties, fashion, and underground music scene to their everyday teenage lives. Gathered together as they are in the exhibit, these archives reflect ordinary experiences, both personal and collective, with a particular eye for the lives of women.
At the reception celebrating the exhibit’s opening, Rosales was on hand to talk about her work and the importance of reframing the history of brown youth via archives like hers. Don’t miss the show for yourself; Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory will be on view through March 8.
Photos by Cole Sansom ’19.