Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory

Since 2015, artist Guadalupe Rosales has been building an archive of vernacular photographs and ephemera connected to Latinx culture in Los Angeles. Her projects exist as both archives of physical objects and crowd sourced digital archives, assembled on her widely followed Instagram accounts: Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz. Guided by an instinct to create counternarratives, Rosales tells the stories of communities often underrepresented in official archives and public memory.

Rosales views her work as a way of decriminalizing and reframing the history of brown youth, as well as connecting and reconstituting community. “I was always attracted to photographs not just for their images, but also for the notes written on the back. They were like relics; they reconnected me.” For this exhibition, which extends from a feature in Aperture’s Fall 2018 issue, “Los Angeles,” Rosales presents an installation of materials from her archives—from photobooth images of couples to young Chicanx women posing with cars to the party crews that ran East LA’s underground music scene in the 1990s.

Aperture Foundation’s public programs and exhibitions are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our Members and other individuals, and major support from foundations, including Ford Foundation, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, Henry Luce Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Reba Judith Sandler Foundation, and public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.