CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas) will host Crossfade LAB on Wednesday, November 16, 2022. The series returns to Crescent Ballroom for its eleventh installment, featuring celebrated performance artist Carlos Martiel and acclaimed musician Xenia Rubinos. Crossfade LAB is the only event of its kind in the nation. It is a thought-provoking blend of conversations, art experiences, live musical performances, and unexpected collaborations with internationally renowned Indigenous, Latinx, and Latin American artists.
Crossfade LAB returns to its home venue Crescent Ballroom. It will be offered in a hybrid manner, offering a live-stream option with bilingual live captioning, allowing the program to traverse physical, linguistic, and auditory barriers for a more accessible experience. This iteration of Crossfade LAB features a special meeting between Cuban-born, Mexico City and New York-based performance artist Carlos Martiel and New York-based Xenia Rubinos. Moderated by MacArthur Fellow and Crossfade LAB co-curator Josh Kun, the evening will blend emotionally charged performances that underscore the lived realities of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color with soulful Caribbean-inspired jazz melodies. The fusion of sound and political image will transport audiences across the dynamic geographies of the Americas, from Cuba to Puerto Rico, New York to Phoenix, underscoring the often-political realities that exist while traversing space and place as people of color.
Since 2016, CALA Alliance has presented ten Crossfade LAB events to sold-out audiences. Each event features a cross-disciplinary conversation, performance, and onstage collaboration between two artists working in the performing, visual, media, and literary arts. CALA Alliance invites artists who are considered great crossfaders: artists looking for points of connection and intersection between different art forms, cultures, communities, and ways of being in the world and who can create meaningful public conversations and animate ideas in new and exciting ways.
Since its inception, Crossfade LAB has featured the work of some of the most important Latinx and Latin American artists of our time, including visual artists Guadalupe Maravilla (New York), Teresita Fernández (New York), Tania Candiani (Mexico City), rafa esparza (Los Angeles), and Carolina Caycedo (Colombia/Los Angeles); literary artists Natalie Diaz (Arizona Mojave, 2018 MacArthur Fellow, and 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner), Daniel Alarcón (New York, 2021 MacArthur Fellow), and Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic); performance artists Nao Bustamante (Los Angeles) and Radio Healer (Arizona); and musicians Alex Antwander (New York/Chile), San Cha (Los Angeles), Julieta Venegas (Mexico City, Grammy Award winner), Carla Morrison (Tecate/Mexico City, Grammy Award winner), Helado Negro (Ecuador/New York), Lido Pimienta (Colombia/Toronto), Javiera Mena (Chile), and Calexico (Arizona).
Crossfade LAB is organized by CALA Alliance in collaboration with ASU Art Museum and Crescent Ballroom. Crossfade LAB is made possible with institutional support provided by the City of Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture. This program is supported in part by an award from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Arizona Community Foundation.