School of Art and Design
RGV Perennial
April 2023
The UTRGV Center for Latin American Arts (CLAA) and RGV Perennial, formerly known as RGV x Art for Change, have a long-running partnership that includes artwork that addresses the issues of migration and sustainability. It displays distinctive artistic works in printmaking, photography, and other media.
The partnership has aided in strengthening the mission and offers of the center, according to Dr. Katherine Moore McAllen, director of the CLAA and associate professor at the UTRGV School of Art and Design.
Festiba Exhibitions
March 2022
To celebrate the start of Festiba 2022, the Center for Latin American Arts proudly presented four exhibitions: Circa by Ángela V. Scardigno, Anima by Carlos Limas. Center colleagues and artists Limas and Scardigno exhibited their original artworks, as colleagues Lopez and Ymbong collaborated with collections at the International Museum of Art & Science in McAllen, Texas.
Uncovered Spaces Exhibition
March 2022 at the IMAS and UTRGV
UTRGV’s Center for Latin American Arts is proud to collaborate with IMAS and Vanderbilt University to organize and curate this exhibition. Uncovered Spaces is an exhibition and event series to explore the social structures that mediate our everyday experiences. The project serves as space for artists and scholars to discuss their art practice related to gender, identity, and social norms. As a project, Uncovered Spaces has brought together artists, art historians, educators, students, and our community, to create a groundbreaking event series at the IMAS in South Texas. This exhibition seeks to connect the creative process, shared knowledge, and feminine solidarity in a collaborative and community-based arts research project in South Texas. This exhibition is curated by Raheleh Filsoofi of Vanderbilt University and directed by Dr. Katherine Moore McAllen of UTRGV.
RGV X Art for Change
February 2022
The Center for Latin American Arts and the College of Fine Arts hosted the opening reception of the exhibition RGV x Art for Change: Cultural and Environmental Sustainability. Curated by Keatan McKeever and juried by Sarita Westrup, the exhibition will showcase artworks that help facilitate our community's collective reflection on the state of sustainability in our environment and culture through conceptual or material works in both 2D and 3D media.
Hostile Terrain 94
September 2021
The CLAA hosted its first face-to-face event of the year in September 2021 with Hostile Terrain 94. This exhibition was created by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-educationmedia. The installation is composed of over 3,500 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019 organized by a collective and anthropologist Jason De León. The Center for Latin American Arts hosted events for students and faculty to help fill out tags at our CLAA spaces and at Rusteberg Gallery on UTRGV’s campuses in Brownsville and Edinburg.
Art and Narrative through Criminal Justices Studies
May 2021
The Center for Latin American Arts and the Department of Criminal Justice hosted a collaborative series of lectures interpreting art and creative narratives through the lens of Criminal Justice studies. University of Texas El Paso and UTRGV faculty spoke about literature, art, poetry, and immigration to raise awareness and compassion for migrants on the US Mexico border and how this relates to Criminal Justice studies. Professor Tim Hernández, UTEP faculty in Bilingual Creative Writing, and Mike Magee, UTRGV faculty in the Criminal Justice Department, presented the works of Undergraduate criminal justice students' creative interpretations of the nonfiction novels "All They Will Call You" and "Lines and Shadows" through their original works of art and poetry. Professor Hernández discussed his book, All They Will Call You. These lectures and the pop-up art exhibition were hosted at the Center for Latin American Arts on our Edinburg campus.
Artist Summit and Workshop
November 2021
This important event featured distinguished keynote speakers Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley (CCRGV), Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist, poet, writer, and activist, Cecilia Ballí, journalist, writer, and anthropologist, Melissa Guerra, food historian, writer, and UTRGV alumna, César L. De León, poet, writer, and UTRGV faculty member, Christopher Carmona, author, UTRGV Associate Professor and Interim Director of Mexican American Studies, Rigoberto A. González, artist, UTRGV faculty member, and winner of the 2021 Migration Narratives grant, Luis A. Corpus, artist and Chair of the Department of Art at South Texas College, and Olga Alanis, artist, faculty member at South Texas College, and UTRGV alumna.
Uncovered Spaces 2022.
Hostile Terrain event 2021.