Manos a la Obra (Let’s do it)
October 25, 2021–February 5, 2022
Reimagining the community marketplace.
18th Street Arts Center is pleased to present the exhibition Manos a la Obra of new work by Cog•nate Collective, along with collaborators from their ongoing Market Exchange project, on view in the Propeller Gallery at 3026 Airport Ave, Santa Monica from October 25, 2021 to February 5, 2022.
Manos a la Obra gathers projects created in long-standing and speculative public marketplaces in the Tijuana-Los Angeles transborder region, continuing Cog•nate Collective’s interest in documenting transnational economic and cultural networks of exchange at the scale of the local.
In this latest body of work, the artists and their collaborators stage dialogues between the handmade and the mass-produced, between craft and second-hand goods, through a series of conceptual/sculptural gestures that are inspired by the labor that artisans and vendors undertake to transform material and socio-economic conditions.
The exhibition features collaborative gestures undertaken in the last year with Santa Monica artisans and vendors working toward establishing a community marketplace in the city that can function as a platform for self-determination and collective agency. With a core group of collaborators including Ines Garcia, Laura Hernandez, Carmela Morales, Lily Alinaghizadeh, Abby Juan, and 18th Street Arts Center intern Brian Rojas, Market Exchange has met since fall of 2020 to begin forming a self-organized artisan vendor cooperative, created an installation at the Pico Pop-Up gallery in collaboration with the Pico Improvement Organization, produced a website, and held several pop-up marketplaces in Santa Monica.
To find out more about the ongoing Market Exchange collaboration begun with Santa Monica artisans in fall 2020, please visit marketexchange.18thstreet.org.
Related events
In conjunction with the exhibition Manos a la Obra, Cog•nate Collective will be leading a tour in Spanish and English from 1:30 to 2pm on October 30, with a meet & greet with artists from 2 to 3pm. Please join us for this casual and fun event! RSVP here.
Artisans will be present at the Downtown Santa Monica Dia de Los Muertos event on the Third Street Promenade on October 30 from 5 to 10pm, and will collaboratively be producing an altare for the event. Altares will be on view through November 2. See downtownsm.com for more information.
Finally we will host a pop-up Artisan Marketplace on January 29 at the Airport. Please visit the exhibition website for more details.
About the artists
Since 2010, Tijuana-Los Angeles based artists and researchers Misael Diaz and Amy Sanchez have collaborated as Cog•nate Collective to develop community-based research projects, public interventions and experimental pedagogical programs in the US/Mexico border region.
Siting their practice primarily within markets, they seek to analyze how popular informal forms of cultural and economic exchange taking place between transnational communities can be mobilized in defiance of solidifying political boundaries—proposing an understanding of the border not as bifurcating line, but as a region expanding and contracting with the movement of people and objects.
Support
Market Exchange is a project commissioned by 18th Street Arts Center. The artists thank Pico Improvement Org (PIO), the City of Santa Monica, and individual 18th Street donors for their support of this project. The Pico Pop Up and Market Exchange’s installation and website as part of the Pop Up, that helped lead to this exhibition, is generously supported by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.
