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Dulce Soledad Ibarra is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and curator with investments in community and identity-emphasized arts and opportunity. As a practicing artist, Ibarra discusses issues of generational guilt and cultural identities in videos, installations, and performances, and recently has been inviting the public to partake in the dialogue via workshops and participatory work. Looking through queer Xicanx perspective, the work is fueled by emotional labor, personal research and analysis.
Currently, the work is centered around the Piñata/Party Supply District of Downtown Los Angeles, engaging in the means of sustaining as a community of businesses and as a place of cultural familiarities and commodities. Ibarra has exhibited, screened, performed, and programmed at venues across Southern California, including Angels Gate Cultural Center, Charlie James Gallery, Consulado General de México en Los Ángeles, Craft Contemporary, Echo Park Film Center, Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Human Resources Los Angeles, ONE Gallery, West Hollywood, Ontario Museum of History and Art, and Pieter Performance Space, among others. Ibarra holds an MFA from the University of Southern California and earned a BFA in Sculpture from California State University, Long Beach.
Dulce Soledad Ibarra’s work is deeply rooted in honoring community. Their practice responds to systemic inequities that affect people beyond just geographic parameters. In 9th to Olympic, Ibarra marks the tenuous nature of marked borders and thresholds, pushing us to think beyond the borders of this commercial district and to think more deeply about the people, history and labor that gave rise to this community.
The title refers to a particular commercial stretch in downtown LA that signals the transition to the Piñata District; at one moment on 9th and with just a few steps, on Olympic, seemingly occupying two places at once. The Los Angeles Piñata District is a regional landmark colored with culture, art, community, and Latinx (primarily Mexican) migrant methods of survival and perseverance, ingenuity and resilience. Ibarra’s work illuminates the ways in which alternative sites of cultural production serve as both modes of subsistence and place-making. – Bianca Morán
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Bianca Morán is a curator, educator, and writer based in Los Angeles. She is the Adjunct Assistant Curator and Public Program Coordinator at Active Cultures. A former K-16 educator in Los Angeles, her work is deeply informed by culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy. Her research interests include history, race and ethnicity, foodways, diaspora, education and pedagogy, critical theory, film, and visual culture. Bianca holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practice and the Public Sphere from USC, an M.Ed. in Education from UCLA, and a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. She was born in Los Angeles and raised between the Bay Area and LA. Bianca is also a single mother raising her daughter, Paloma.