CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas) will host Crossfade LAB on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. The series returns to Crescent Ballroom for its tenth installment, featuring celebrated multidisciplinary artist Guadalupe Maravilla and acclaimed musician and filmmaker Alex Anwandter. Crossfade LAB is the only event of its kind in the nation, a thought-provoking blend of conversations, art experiences, live musical performances, and unexpected collaborations with internationally renowned Indigenous, Latinx, and Latin American artists.
Named the 2019 Best of Phoenix: Best Art Conversation, Crossfade LAB returns to Crescent Ballroom on March 9, 2022. Crossfade LAB will continue to 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 features a special meeting between New York-based multidisciplinary artist Guadalupe Maravilla (U.S./El Salvador) and Grammy Award-nominated artist Alex Anwandter (Chile). Moderated by MacArthur Fellow and Crossfade LAB co-curator Josh Kun, the evening will blend meditative healing sound waves and sculptural installations with vibrant, emotionally charged electro-pop ballads and melodies. The fusion of sound and image will transport audiences across the dynamic geographies of the Americas, from Chile to El Salvador, New York to Phoenix, underscoring the often-political realities that exist while traversing space and place.
The organizing curators are Josh Kun, Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Alana Hernandez, Executive Director and Curator, CALA Alliance, and Julio César Morales, Senior Curator, ASU Art Museum.
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 National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Arizona Community Foundation.
About the Artists
Guadalupe Maravilla (b. San Salvador, El Salvador) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s due to the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment of his migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities.
Maravilla’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Alex Anwandter (b. Santiago, Chile) is a Director, screenwriter, and musician. A popular and critically acclaimed artist in Chile and Latin America, twice nominated for the Latin Grammy Awards, Anwandter’s musical career has spanned over ten years, publishing five albums, all of which were composed and produced by himself. The artist has toured extensively throughout Chile, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
Anwandter’s interest in film drove him to direct his and other musicians’ video clips. Named “an artist poised for stardom” by Time Magazine, his music and videos have been lauded by national and international press while also becoming a prominent queer activist. In 2016, inspired by Daniel Zamudio’s horrific murder, he began his filmmaking career with his debut full-length film, “You’ll Never be Alone,” whose world premiere took place at the Berlin International Film Festival, in the Panorama section, where it was awarded the prestigious Teddy Award.
About the Curators
Josh Kun is Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication and Professor of Communication and Journalism in the USC Annenberg School. A cultural historian, curator, journalist, and MacArthur Fellow, Kun writes and researches about music and the politics of cultural connection. He is the winner of an American Book Award (2005) and a Berlin Prize (2018). He is an author and editor of several books, anthologies, and artist monographs. As a curator of music and public humanities projects, he has worked with Prospect New Orleans, SFMOMA, The California African American Museum, The Grammy Museum, The Getty Foundation, and the Los Angeles Public Library. He co-edits the book series Refiguring American Music for Duke University Press.
Alana Hernandez is Executive Director & Curator of CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas). As Executive Director, Hernandez fosters Latinx artistic talent in the Metro-Phoenix region and beyond while strengthening cultural ties to the Americas. Prior to her time at CALA Alliance, Hernandez was Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She has held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico; Hunter East Harlem, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Phoenix Art Museum; and BRIC Arts | Media, Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in MCASD.Digital (2021), HereIn Journal (2020), the exhibition catalogues Gabriel Rico: Unity in Variety (2021) John Rivas: Los Voces Inside of Me (2020), Atlpan: Claudia Peña Salinas (2019), and Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (2015). She is the organizer and contributor to the forthcoming Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego: Handbook of the Collection (2021) and contributor to the three-print volume, Grove Encyclopedia of Latin American Art and Architecture.
Julio César Morales is Senior Curator at the ASU Art Museum at Arizona State University. Employing various media and visual strategies, artist, educator, and curator Morales explores migration, underground economies, and labor on personal and global scales. Morales’s artwork has been shown at Lyon Biennale (Lyon, France); Istanbul Biennale (Turkey); Los Angeles County Art Museum; Singapore Biennale; Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany); Prospect 3 (New Orleans, Louisiana) SFMOMA (San Francisco); Perez Art Museum (Miami, Florida); and The UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), amongst others. His work has been written about in Flash Art, The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Art Nexus, and Art in America. His work is in private and public collections, including MoMA, The Los Angeles County Art Museum, The Kadist Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Deutsche Bank. Morales was Adjunct Professor at The San Francisco Art Institute and Associate Professor in Curatorial Studies at The California College for the Arts. Morales is an advisor and writer for The San Francisco Quarterly Art Magazine; from 2008 to 2012, he was Adjunct Curator for Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for The Arts in San Francisco. Morales was a contributing curator for the Japanese pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2020 and is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris.