Durón Gallery at SPARC

Past Exhibitions

The Durón Gallery at SPARC has been showcasing exhibitions that promote social change and give voice to marginalized communities since 1977. The gallery remains committed to advancing causes such as social justice, environmental justice, immigrant rights, education, LGBTQ rights, and transnational peace.

Past Exhibition

Recent

July 20 – August 31, 2023

Mercedes Gertz: It’s All in a Dream

Mexican conceptual artist, Mercedes Gertz, takes center stage once again with her latest exhibition, designed to ignite the creative potential that resides within our dreams. The exhibition, accompanied by a series of empowering workshops, promises to immerse attendees in a profound exploration of symbolic images that delve into the depths of the human psyche.

June 17 – July 8, 2023

Subverting the Male Gaze: Susan Rennie Disrupts Art History

In this series of digital photo-montages, the feminist artist invades iconic works of western art and gazes back, sending up masterpieces with scintillating satire. Each piece delivers a blow to patriarchal canonical scenes through a sparkling and mischievous feminist lens.

December 1, 2021 – June 30, 2023

Judith F. Baca: Selected Prints

Celebrating the SPARC’s artistic director Judith F. Baca, “Judith F. Baca: Selected Prints” showcases a selection of her public artworks and recent works.

Past Exhibition

2016-2021

February 27 – April 10, 2021

Why We Won’t Just Leave

Why We Won’t Just Leave features portraits, paintings, photography, stories, and video and audio profiles of over 15 artists, scientists, writers and activists responding to climate change in Alaska. The exhibition debuts virtually in the SPARC virtual gallery in February 2021, introducing Alaska as a major player in the world’s climate crisis to an audience separated by 3000 miles, but not separate from its impacts. Ancillary programs will include a panel talk, a participatory workshop with an artist, and youth programming. Attendees will leave the exhibition enriched by the information provided by exhibition participants, with tangible connections and action points, and inspiration for enacting change in their own communities.

Participating Artists & Contributors:
Ayana Young, Bill Brody, Bill Hanson, Chad Brown, Hannah Perrine Mode, Heather McFarland, Jennifer Moss, Jessica Thornton, Jody Juneby Potts, Kate Troll, Keri Oberly, Klara Maisch, Krista Heeringa, Kristin Timm, Lindsay Carron, Nathaniel Wilder, Quannah Chasinghorse Potts, Sheryl Reily, and Tim Musso.

October 1, 2020

Signs from the Heart: California’s Chicano Murals

SPARC is proud to present a special exhibition on Chicano murals in California. The resistance, resilience, and cultural pride of Chicano murals continues to empower generations and to influence public art in our cities. SPARC maintains the largest archive on public art and muralism in Los Angeles, and we are pleased to bring original archival images of Chicano murals to the public through a virtual gallery exhibition.

August 8 – September 19, 2020

The Patchwork Healing Blanket: Piece by Piece and Country by Country

The Patchwork Healing Blanket: Piece-by-Piece and Country-by-Country is an international textile art project that unites generations of women in a global movement against gender-based violence and the destruction of Mother Earth. In 2019 a group of women artists from Oaxaca and Mexico City, led by Founder/Director Marietta Bernstorff, started working together to develop the Patchwork Healing Blanket/La Manta de Curacíon in response to an outrageous increase in the murder of women in Mexico that year. The artists began to invite women from all over Mexico and the world to participate in making a patchwork cloth piece that speaks out against the violent crimes we are all witnessing through news outlets and social media. The result was tremendous – 600 patchworks were sent to Mexico City from San Miguel Allende, Tijuana, Oaxaca, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Brasil, Germany, Greece, England, Spain, Canada, and the United States. The patchworks were sewn together to create large blankets that were displayed in the Zócalo in Mexico City for one day in February 2020, creating a powerful public art installation and a celebration of healing with artists, educators, healers, women, children, and allies.

April 1, 2020

SPARC Ahora

SPARC Ahora, previously scheduled to open April 1st, can now be experienced at home through a virtual walkthrough of the Dúron Gallery. The exhibition captures the contemporary work of SPARC today. Featured work includes: SPARC’s art education program, art & activism workshops, mural restorations and much more. We hope to continue to inspire and encourage creativity as you share in the work SPARC is so proud to be a part of.

November 9, 2019 – January 18, 2020

The Box Project

The Box Project originated in France where Rebecca Dolinsky assembled the Salonistas in 2015, a group of creative women who meet regularly to talk about their work and support one another’s independent endeavors. Dolinsky’s initiative soon inspired the creation of two sister groups, one in Mexico City and another in Los Angeles, which quickly grew with women wishing to participate. Last year, Dolinsky imagined a way to exchange works with the two groups. In a world that is increasingly virtual, she wanted to exchange something real, not virtual, with the women in these two cities. The Paris Salonistas sent small artworks in the form of matchbox-sized boxes to their sister groups, and responding to this generosity, the women in Mexico City and L.A. sent works in return.

September 21 – November 16, 2019

De Colores Means All of Us: Art and the Dialectics of Coalition Building in Communities of Color

This exhibition will focus on cross cultural relations between female-identified Latinxs, artists of Caribbean descent and African American communities living in Southern California. The curated effort focuses on Black, Caribbean and Brown relations and our shared history of struggle and how more than ever we need to work hard to continue strengthening our alliances. The premise asserts that knowing and exploring each other’s cultural production and history through our art, we can move beyond the petty and the divisiveness that seems to be rampant in our country today. Curated by Claudia Huiza

September 27th-August 5th, 2019

Mercedes Gertz: Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole explores the symbolic language of images from a Mexican feminist perspective. Symbolic language has the ability to express abstract ideas that are otherwise difficult to translate in direct, analytical speech or text. This language of images is felt more so than it is heard, and honors the realm of instinct, dreams, and intuition.

September 27th-August 5th, 2019

Christina Schlesinger: Tomboys

SPARC presents Christina Schlesinger in the Durón Gallery . Tomboys features a vibrant collection of artworks by Christina Schlesinger that examines the intersections between gender, identity, fashion, sex, and representation. The exhibition includes over twenty mixed media oil paintings that explore self-portraiture, feminist nudes, and lesbian sex. Schlesinger’s body of work honors tomboys everywhere and contributes to an evolving conversation on gender and identity.

September 27 – August 5, 2019

Ellie Shakiba: July 19

July 19 by Ellie Shakiba is an exhibition of photos and videos documenting Australia’s inhumane offshore detention center on the remote island nation of Nauru. Shakiba created the images while imprisoned for nearly six years in the Nauru Regional Processing Centre where she was held after fleeing Iran in 2013 to seek asylum in Australia. July 19 at SPARC marks the premiere of Shakiba’s images in the United States.

January 24 – April 8, 2017

20 Years of the UCLA/SPARC Digital Mural Lab

20 Years of The UCLA/SPARC Digital Mural Lab showcases a sampling of projects that highlight instruction, community organizing, research and artistic production. These projects are emblematic of partnerships with nonprofit advocacy groups, civic institutions, public schools and municipalities that provide students, artists, academics and community members an alternative model for articulating community needs. The images in the show are small scale reproductions of large scale permanently installed public artworks or, in the case of the CARECEN mural, represents a major phase in the artistic production. In any case, the final image memorializes a much more expansive scope of work that establishes the lab as preeminent partner of vulnerable and underrepresented communities.

May 13 – June 24, 2017

The Inuit Send the World a Canary

The Inuit Send the World a Canary is an exhibition of the ninth panel added to The World Wall, A Vision of the Future Without Fear. Designed by artist Tania Godoroja Pearse, the mural speaks to the issues of global warming and the exploitation of natural resources, and their profound and uncontrolled destruction of Canadian life and landscapes. Inspired by Sheila Watt-Cloutier who brought international attention to the spectra of global warming changes in the north several years ago at a circumpolar conference, the rampant nonrenewable resource development in the form of mining, oil sands and shale gas extraction, along with leaking oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing our waterways and lands like a web of bleeding arteries, continue to threaten our collective ways of living and the natural systems we all depend on. The exhibition will document the process of producing the mural as well as the activism surrounding it.

July 8 – September 9, 2017

TOMBOYS: Christina Schlesinger (SPARC Co-Founder) and invited artists

Christina Schlesinger exhibits mixed media paintings based on images and memories as a tomboy. Painted on her tomboy clothing: jeans, flannels, and T-shirt, the work reflects her clothing as an expression of resisting gendered norms. “I fought with my mother over wearing dresses. I wanted to wear pants, shoot marbles, and ride my bike really fast. I led a little gang that stole comic books from Scannel’s drug store. That bright and sturdy tomboy spirit saved and saves me.” The “Tomboys” paintings fit snugly within a body of work that draws on images from all aspects of Ms. Schlesinger’s life, much of it informed by a collage aesthetic that combines images with other materials. “Now that I’m at the other end of my life, I’m thinking of who can be my mentors as I’m getting older. And I thought of my grandmothers. Grandmother Schlesinger was a suffragette, and Grandmother Cannon wrote books and was a classmate of Gertrude Stein.”

September 23 – November 17, 2017

Influences of cultural iconography “ Ni de aqui ni de alla”

Migration has played a major role on the influence of Mexicano/Chicano/Mexican-American and what is today called Latino art in the United States. The impact of artists living this dual reality across borders from Oaxaca, to Mexico City, Los Angeles and throughout the US, has influenced a powerful exchange of ideas and visual dialogues for a new generation of young artists. Contemporary Mexican artists are re-contextualizing the visual iconography of Chicanos, Cholos, urban Mexicans, adding indigenous language and visual cultural identification to the new Latino art scene in Los Angeles and Oaxaca. They are asking for resistance and defiance on issues that are currently affecting their lives, their land their main source of food (maize), their language and culture. The new generation of Mexican artists is empowered, highly educated and aware of an oppressive racism against them in both countries, which they are no longer willing to accept.

December 2 – January 27, 2017

To Protect & Serve? Posters Protesting 50 Years of Police Violence by the Center for Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) / Vincent Valdez

Current struggles against police violence and state repression are part of a long history of resistance, that is documented by and reflected in graphics produced by the artists, activists and organizers who participated in these struggles. This exhibition will continue CSPG’s mission to reclaim the power of art to educate, agitate, and inspire people to action. In addition to the posters, artist Vincent Valdez will exhibit a series of new etchings, serigraphs and lithographs depicting historical incidences of police violence in Los Angeles.

Past Exhibition