November 17, 2021, 7pm
In-person with livestream
222 East Monroe Street
85004 Phoenix Arizona
CALA Alliance will host Crossfade LAB on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, at Herberger Theater in Phoenix, Arizona. Initially postponed due to the health crisis brought on by COVID-19, CALA Alliance is pleased to host the return of Crossfade LAB with its ninth installment. The series promises a thought-provoking evening featuring conversations, art experiences, and unexpected collaborations with internationally renowned Indigenous, Latinx, and Latin American artists.
This iteration of Crossfade LAB features a special meeting between celebrated visual artist and MacArthur fellow Teresita Fernández and rising music and performance star San Cha. For the first time, Crossfade LAB will be live-streamed with bilingual live captioning, allowing the event to traverse physical, linguistic, and auditory barriers for a more accessible experience. Moderated by author and Crossfade LAB co-curator Josh Kun, the evening will experiment, agitate, and shimmer, blending installations and sculptures with cumbias and telenovelas—a mix of sound and image that will take you across geographies of the Americas, from Cuba to Jalisco, the Bay Area to Miami, New York to LA.
Since 2016, CALA Alliance has presented several Crossfade LAB events to sold-out audiences. Every event features a cross-disciplinary conversation, performance, and onstage collaboration between two artists working in the performing, visual, media, and literary arts. Crossfade LAB consistently features great crossfaders—artists looking for points of connection and intersection between different art forms, cultures, communities, and ways of being in the world. Since its inception, Crossfade LAB has featured the work of some of the most important Latinx and Latin American artists of our time, including visual artists Tania Candiani (Mexico City), rafa esparza (Los Angeles), and Carolina Caycedo (Colombia-Los Angeles); literary artists Natalie Diaz (Arizona Mojave; 2018 McArthur Fellow and 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner), Daniel Alarcón (Peruvian American), and Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic); performance artists Nao Bustamante (Los Angeles) and Radio Healer (Arizona); and musicians Julieta Venegas (Tijuana; Grammy Award winner), Carla Morrison (Tecate/Mexico City; Grammy Award winner), Helado Negro (Ecuador-NYC), Lido Pimienta (Colombia-Toronto), Javiera Mena (Chile), and Calexico (Arizona).
Crossfade LAB is organized by CALA Alliance in collaboration with ASU Art Museum and Herberger Theater. Crossfade LAB is made possible with support from the Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation. This program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The organizing curators are Alana Hernandez, Executive Director and Curator, CALA Alliance, Julio César Morales, Senior Curator, ASU Art Museum, and Josh Kun, Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California.
About the artists
Teresita Fernández is a conceptual artist best known for her monumental public projects that expand on notions of landscape and place. Her work, often inspired by natural phenomena—meteor showers, fire, and the night sky—invites experiential engagement with the work and the space it occupies. Fernández places particular importance on her choice of materials such as gold, graphite, and other minerals that have loaded histories, often tied to colonialism, history, land, and power.
San Cha is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles, increasingly known for her visceral and explosive live performances. Her name, derived from the Spanish word sancha, which translates to “mistress,” is a mischievous reference to the title of San, given to male saints in the Catholic tradition. Fans of cumbia and punk, bolero and electro, flock to see San Cha’s emotional renditions of traditional Mexican rancheras and original songs that queer conventions of identity, power, and love. Her striking stage presence is accompanied by the one-of-a-kind garments she adorns, aesthetic reflections of the years spent performing in drag and club scenes in the Bay.
About CALA Alliance
CALA Alliance is a multidisciplinary Latinx arts organization based in Phoenix that collaborates with artists and arts organizations to connect Arizona, Mexico, and Latin America. We advance our mission through innovative public programming, artist residencies, and cultural exchanges that reimagine Arizona’s place in the Americas.
