No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt)
Elia Arce
WEST COAST PREMIERE
- Price
- Free Admission
- Genre
- Art
- Season
- Fall 2025
- DATE
- OCT 30
- TIME
- THU, 7 PM
- program
- Not yet available
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About
Internationally renowned performance artist and activist Elia Arce enacts an intimate, ritualistic space in No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt). The performance is conceived as a process of grief and healing–one that is rooted in solidarity, empathy, and care. Arce is a pioneering performance artist working in Costa Rica and in Southern California, taking up subjects such as national identity, migration, and racialization. Arce’s performance continues her ongoing commitment to creating “living monuments,” works that approach memory as collective actions and communally-produced experiences.
Following the performance, Arce will be in a bilingual conversation tracing the evolution of her socially engaged performance art and activist theater in Southern California, with LA-based artist Jackie Amezquita and Getty Research Institute researcher Jasmine Magaña.
Simultaneous interpretation available in English and Spanish.
Please note: No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) contains strobe lights and mature content.
No Time to Mourn is organized by REDCAT and the Getty Research Institute’s Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative (LALAI), which seeks to facilitate research on Latin American art, focusing especially on Central America and its diaspora. For more information see LALAI’s project page.
No Time to Mourn is part of the REDCAT curatorial research Visions of the nahuales: shape-changers in real time made possible by Teiger Foundation.
about the artists
Elia Arce is an artist who works in a variety of mediums, including video installation, performance art, experimental theater, writing, photo, video, sculptural performance, and living memorials. She has received national and international awards from the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Performance Network, the Durfee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program, and was also nominated for the Herb Alpert/CalArts Award in Theater. In 2008, she received a fellowship from New Voices, a Ford Foundation Initiative, to develop a social sculpture pilot project entitled The Gulf Coast Art Corridor (from Houston to Alabama), and was one of the five winners in the United States to receive an American Masterpiece Award for her piece First Woman on the Moon. As a guest scholar, she has taught the theory and practice of performance at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the University of Houston, the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, and the Universidad de Costa Rica. She has exhibited her work abroad in Spain, England, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, El Salvador, Cuba, and Mali, and in Costa Rica at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, Museo de Arte Costarricense, Museo del Banco Central, Centro Cultural Español, Museo de la Mujer and Galería Nacional. A book about the first 25 years of her career was published by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at the University of New York. She is a dual citizen of Costa Rica and the United States.
Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationships between land, memory, and identity across genealogies. Her practice is channeled through the fuse of biomaterials such as earth, masa, charcoal, and rain, treating them as active carriers of ancestral knowledge. Through installations, performances, and sculptures, Amézquita engages the ecological and spiritual dimensions of place, emphasizing impermanence, transformation, and interdependence among human and more-than-human worlds. Her work further explores movement, collective memory, adaptation, and regeneration, centering the transformative power of interconnection.
Amézquita received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2022 and her BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, in 2018. She has exhibited with The Hammer Museum, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), 18th St Art Center, The Armory Center of the Arts, Vincent Price Art Museum, The Annenberg Space for Photography, Human Resources Los Angeles, and MAD (Museum of Art and Design) in New York. Amézquita is the recipient of the Mohn Public Recognition Award (2023), Mohn Land Award (2023), Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Los Angeles Art Fund (2022), and National Performance Network Fund (2022). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum Los Angeles and Denver Art Museum. She has been featured in Art in America, Cultured, Flaunt, whitewall, Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, LA Weekly, hyperallergic, and the Walker Art Center magazine.
Amézquita exhibited in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made In LA 2023 - Acts of Living exhibition where her epic piece El suelo de nos alimenta, consisting of 144 framed soil paintings, won the Mohn Public Recognition Award and entered the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum.
Jasmine Magaña is a research specialist at the Getty Research Institute working with the Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative (LALAI). Her research interests span the field of contemporary art in the Americas, with particular attention to the evolution of the concepts of public art and art in public space, performance, and socially engaged art since the 1970s, as well as artist-led collaborative projects in the urban centers of San Salvador, Bogotá, and Los Angeles. Previously, she has worked in curatorial and education departments at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California. She holds an MA in Art History & Visual Studies from Duke, an MA in Art History & Theory from the University of Essex, and a BA from Seattle University.
