noé olivas: Gilded Dreams

Curated by Ana Briz

Featuring newly commissioned performances by robyko, Patrisse Cullors, and Marcus Kuiland-Nazario

Presented by Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM) Gallery with support from Charlie James Gallery, Gilded Dreams is a solo presentation of a new body of work by interdisciplinary artist noé olivas. The exhibition features new works in sculpture, painting, and performance as a continuation of the artist’s investigation into what he calls the poetics of labor. 

For over a decade, olivas has explored the various manifestations of labor in the United States from his lived experience as a first-generation Mexican American from a working-class family. Gilded Dreams expands on the poetics of labor by interrogating labor’s relationship with leisure, the American West, and its potential for liberation through CDM’s three guiding themes: ancestry, abolition, and healing. olivas is a co-founder of CDM, an artist collective and gallery dedicated to communal arts and education, and its guiding themes have long been central to his own practice as he explores his family’s relationship to the invisibility of immigrant labor and the grueling toughness of its performance. Gilded Dreams is both a critique of US-Mexico relations and a meditation on the possibility of collective liberation. Utilizing an urban vernacular rasquachismo, olivas employs his family’s archive of tools, objects, and other collected materials to construct sculptures that meditate on the intended material use of these objects while also transforming them into spiritual icons capable of forging a path towards freedom. 

The opening reception for Gilded Dreams will feature a performance program that honors important members of olivas’ artistic community. Happening durationally, the commissioned performances will reinterpret CDM’s core themes of ancestry, abolition, and healing, and present audiences with transformative moments of collective reflection.