About

The artist collective Tlacolulokos is made up of Dario Canul (b. 1981) and Cosijoesa Cernas (b. 1986), both natives of Tlacolula, Oaxaca, Mexico. The collective works in different graphic mediums, including: video, sound, graphic art and painting. Their work is a combination of different styles from street art, to murals and screen printing. Their works take place on the street and within traditional art spaces. Through their work, Tlacolulokos offers a reflection of local reality, and the problems and challenges of their place of origin.

Amanda de la Garza Mata is the curatorial consultant for Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A. De la Garza lives and works in Mexico City as Adjunct Curator at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC, UNAM). She has been awarded the Emerging Curators Prize, Frontiers Biennial, and the International Curatorial Projects Grant. This is the second exhibition in which she has worked with the artist collective Tlacolulokos.

Yolanda Cruz is a filmmaker from Oaxaca, Mexico, and creator of the exhibition documentary, Tlacolulokos! Her work has screened at film festivals and museums around the world including the Sundance Film Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, Park la Villette, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Institute of Cinema in Mexico City. Cruz’s honors include an Audience and Best Feature Documentary award from The National Geographic All Roads Film Project 2005 and The Expresión en Corto International Film Festival 2009 in Guanajuato, Mexico.

She holds an MFA from the UCLA film school and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College. Cruz is also an alumna of the Sundance Institute Native Lab.

Anayansi Diaz-Cortes produced the audio pieces that are included in the exhibition Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A. Anayansi is an award-winning radio and podcast producer in the U.S. and Mexico. Her work has aired on PRI’s The World, NPR’s All Things Considered, KCRW’s To the Point, This American Life, and Unfictional, Radio Ambulante, and Pop-Up Magazine.

Xóchitl Flores-Marcial is a member of the local Oaxacan community in Los Angeles and holds a PhD in History from UCLA for her research on the Zapotec cultural practices of collaboration and exchange. She will be an assistant professor at Cal State Northridge this fall. Xóchitl has lectured at numerous Mexican institutions and was a guest researcher at the Getty Research Institute. She is an active member of the UCLA working group “Zapotexts,” an inter- disciplinary and bi-national research team of art historians, historians, and linguists dedicated to the study of colonial Zapotec documents, and is serving as coordinator and as a research consultant for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ PST project.