Nepantla: Border Arte draws together local visual and performance artists who connect with a borderland identity, as defined by queer Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. The borderland is a physical and geographical boundary, as well as a physiological, spiritual, political, and socio-cultural space. These artists exist in nepantla, exploring identidad through autohistoria, testimonio, and the never ending plática surrounding who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told. The works approach themes of generational assimilation, cultural erasure, discrimination, and experiences of contending with a dominant culture. Many of the pieces speak to tradition, loss, lineage, and family. Some of the work comments on the immigrant experience, as well as the involuntary immigration of peoples through historical border shifts. Each piece contributes to a collective identity and a liberatory space for healing and social change. We gather in the borderlands. We are neither here nor there, but we are whole.

 

 

Roxanne Gray is a Tejana Salt Lake City-based choreographer, teaching artist, and curator, working to build community through collaborative structures and curated experiences. Her work explores Chicanx identity through experimental movement practices and curatorial frameworks that build space for dialogue, storytelling, and cultural reclamation through shared experiences.

 

 

Allison Martínez Arocho is a Puerto Rican artist and educator whose vibrant sculptures and paintings express nostalgia, cultural love, and a deep personal connection to homeland. Her artwork explores ancestral wisdom, identity, and memory through hybrid forms inspired by traditional practices, harmonizing distant geographies with present environments and internal landscapes.

 

Andrew Alba is a self-taught artist from Salt Lake City whose expressive works use construction materials to reflect cultural identity, politics, labor, and working-class resistance. His imagery confronts assimilation and tradition through rough textures and symbolic references, honoring immigrant narratives while exploring collective strength, trauma, displacement, and domestic spaces.

 

Bianca Velasquez is a Salt Lake City artist and writer exploring themes of family, selfhood, and healing through painting, beadwork, and emotional storytelling on canvas. Her artwork reflects maternal sacrifice and immigration, using redacted imagery to reclaim presence, celebrate endurance, and honor the nuanced labor of love and transformation.

 

Jazmin Guzman is a Salt Lake City-based visual artist whose cyanotypes and alternative photography explore memory, identity, family dynamics, and generational echoes of cultural heritage. Her layered glass composition reveals and obscures ancestral presence, using distance and translucency to examine the emotional resonance of transformation, lineage, and spiritual connection.

 

Kelly Tapia-Chuning is a mixed Xicana fiber artist exploring identity and decolonization through textile dismantling, material ritual, and land-rooted practices informed by ancestral knowledge. Through reconstructed serapes, Her work mends generational trauma and susto—an ancestral illness of spirit—by honoring Indigenous histories with tactile storytelling and spiritual reclamation.

 

Lunares (Alethia Rodriguez) is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City based in Salt Lake City, whose beadwork and illustrations reflect personal healing and emotional transformation. Their work honors immigrant resilience and transformation through symbolic imagery—like the chrysalis and butterfly—exploring identity and metamorphosis as sacred acts of survival and becoming.

 

Mao Barroterán is a visual and tattoo artist from Tijuana whose evolving practice blends pre-Hispanic iconography with surreal, contemporary cultural narratives. Their work resists imposed divisions by celebrating shared cultural roots across borders, portraying unity, ancestral strength, and connection through layered visual storytelling.

 

Maru Quevedo is a brown mestiza immigrant artist and curator from Buenos Aires whose analog photography, screen printing, and illustration explore gender, identity, and collective liberation. She is also the founder of SISTER, a Salt Lake City collective that uplifts marginalized artists through inclusive exhibitions centered on visibility, equity, and community-building.

 

Miguel Hernandez is a Utah-based fine art and street photographer who captures emotional depth and quiet beauty through observations of everyday life and memory. His intuitive images reflect transformation and connection, inviting reflection on presence, absence, and the layered experiences that shape personal and collective identity.

 

Mika Rane is an illustrator and painter inspired by Mexico City, whose playful yet poignant work explores family stories, migration, and cultural inheritance. Through memories of her grandfather’s cactus garden, she honors ancestral legacy and resilience, connecting generations through nourishment, storytelling, and tender acts of remembrance.

 

Pablo Cruz-Ayala is a Mexican-born, Utah-raised artist and advocate whose work uplifts undocumented experiences through Chicano aesthetics, oral storytelling, and community-based research. Their practice reflects healthcare inequity and community resilience, honoring personal and collective strength through narratives of maternal care, migration, and undocumented survival.

 

Sara Serratos is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist and educator in Salt Lake City whose work investigates landscape, housing, identity, and systems of control. Her sculptures and performances critique institutional data practices and food systems, transforming familiar objects into reflections on preservation, surveillance, and ancestral nourishment.

 

Vicky Lowe is a Chiapas-born artist and educator in Salt Lake City whose weaving, collage, and painting defend Indigenous memory and cultural continuity. Her practice is rooted in survivance—the active presence of Indigenous culture—creating woven stories that resist assimilation and offer pathways for healing, hope, and resilience.

 

I watch my sister watch herself in the bathroom mirror. I am conscious of her in this moment in between. I ask myself how I should represent her on canvas. I wonder if I can. Through most of art history women have been made to be little more than props. A woman was purity and chastity personified as she lay naked in front of the man who would use her image for his own immortalization. We will never know her name or her impact. She was a muse, an ideal, a body, only. Women were not artists. It was, and is, radical for a woman to represent another woman on canvas.

 

I use oil paint for its texture and for its forgiveness. Oil paint can change its mind halfway through a painting and be something different by the end of the work. Its bones can be buried under a layer that is thicker and more confident than the one that came before. Oil paint has weight and presence. It refuses to be only one thing.

My sister looks in the mirror. She is textured and layered with a commanding presence. She will be something different by the end of the night. She is a woman, and she refuses, implicitly, to be only one thing. I wonder, again, how I can possibly begin to represent her, and our relationship, in oils on canvas. I am reminded that this is radical, and I am honored.

 

 

Matalyn Zundel was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and received her Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing from the University of Utah. She uses primarily oil paints and is interested in the figure and the lives lived by the women that surround her as well as the women that don’t. She is keenly aware of the impact these women have on her life and well-being. She hopes to honor them through her work and life.