Institute of the Arts and Sciences
100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, CA
P (831) 502-7252
Email ias@ucsc.edu
January 31, 2025 - April 6, 2025
12- 5 p.m. Tuesdays - Saturdays
The first survey exhibition of artists Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, EDELO brings together new and existing works emerging from their collaborative and individual fifteen-year explorations into the roles art can play in radical modes of community building and social, political, and economic change.
EDELO features video, sculpture, installation, and performance works, many of which have never before seen in an art institutional context, which together show the trajectory of the artists’ collaborative practice since 2009. That year, Rollow and Duarte repurposed the abandoned United Nations building in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico, renaming it EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be). The building had been abandoned by the UN after displaced indigenous community members occupied its offices. Inspired by the 1994 indigenous Zapatista uprising, which used art as a tool to demand immediate and drastic social and economic change, Rollow and Duarte collaborated with members of the Zapatista community to reimagine the building as an intercultural artist residency, experimental art laboratory, and safe house.
Artworks in EDELO reflect on that experience and the continued practices by Rollow and Duarte to work in collaboration with diverse communities, creating radical spaces and artworks that confront the failed institutional responses to social and political oppression.
The exhibition is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.
Mia Eve Rollow is a multidisciplinary nomadic artist that makes site-specific work that cultivates terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. Working in globally engaged collectives of artistic practice, she incorporates healing strategies from pre-colonial practices and uses magical realist aesthetics to explore the psyche. Engaging whole communities, these projects aim to counteract eugenic civic paradigms and connect art to radical political strategies for liberation.
Caleb Duarte migrated from Northern Mexico to the farm working communities of the Central Valley in California. His sculptural performances, installations, and paintings confront issues of institutional encounter, the use of the body in distinct political and artistic movements, and art’s pedagogical possibilities. He has collaborated with autonomous indigenous Zapatista communities, communities in movement, and working children and refugees. A professor of sculpture at Fresno City College, his work and performances have been widely shown in the United States and internationally. Image by Mari Martinez.
