Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies McNeil 403 (12PM) & McNeil Atrium (1PM for lunch)
Please join us on September 6, 2024 for our annual Almuerzo de Bienvenida with award-winning visual artist Michelle Angela Ortiz!
Ortiz will talk about the Our Market project, a community-centered, multi-layered, multi-year public art project focused on supporting the (im)migrant vendors, business owners, and neighbors that work and reside in the 9th Street Market, the artist’s home for 40+ years. Lunch will feature delicious food from Casa México, by award-winning chef Cristina Martinez, a collaborator in the Our Market project.
Please RSVP HERE.
Michelle Angela Ortiz is a visual artist, skilled muralist, community arts educator, and filmmaker who uses her art as a vehicle to represent people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted. Through community arts practices, painting, documentaries, and public art installations, she creates a safe space for dialogue around some of the most profound issues communities and individuals may face. Her work tells stories using richly crafted and emotive imagery to claim and transform spaces into a visual affirmation that reveals the strength and spirit of the community.
For 25 years, Ortiz has designed and created over 50 large-scale public works nationally and internationally. Since 2008, Ortiz has led art for social change public art projects in Costa Rica & Ecuador and as a Cultural Envoy through the US Embassy in Fiji, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba. In the Cultural Envoy residencies, she develops an in-depth curriculum that sets a structure on how the community is engaged and a work plan for the implementation of the public art project.
Ortiz has exhibited her works in many galleries and museums that include the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the ICA Boston. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and The New Yorker. She continues to explore other methods of creating public artwork through digital and traveling murals, site-specific installations, interactive exhibitions, and documentaries.
Ortiz is a Leeway Foundation Media Resident Artist, Art is Essential Grantee, an Art For Justice Fund Grantee, a Pew Fellow, Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellow, and a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist National Fellow. In 2016, she received the Americans for the Arts' Public Art Year in Review Award which honors outstanding public art projects in the nation.
She is a board member of Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art and history studio that works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory.