Curated by Aaron Gomez and Guest Curator Steve Galindo
On view August 1 – September 12, 2026
Opening Reception to take place on August 1, 2025 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Credits/sponsors:
Made possible by the generous support of Diane Allen.
This exhibition is part of FotoSoCal by CuratorLove, a constellation of exhibitions bringing together more than 20 college galleries and affiliated spaces across the region.
At the originating venue, Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams was supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Michael Asher Foundation, the Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, the Richard M. and Rosann Gelvin Noel Krannert Art Museum Fund, and several individual exhibition supporters.
Presented by
Supported by
Photo credit: Taryn Mills Photography
Millie Wilson
Red Top, 1992.
Velveteen profile, enameled wood shelf
Courtesy of the artist ©Millie Wilson
- Save the Date:
Sat, Aug 1 | Opening Reception
Opening Reception to take place on August 1, 2025 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm
About the Exhibition
In Blessings from the Three, Amina Cruz transforms the redlined landscapes of Los Angeles into living sites where histories and hauntings of dispossession, queer memory, and communal feeling persist in the present through enduring relationships to place.
To be invited into Cruz’s time and space is to be inundated by a transgenerational queer affect that queer Brown communities have carried across generations. Over time, these inheritances begin to form a kind of forcefield—or even an armor—akin to what Gloria Anzaldúa calls la facultad: “an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide.” And, most importantly, from la facultad we encounter those whose “sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world,” as Anzaldúa, our ancestral tortillera herself, tells us from her afterlife. Cruz recenters these “faces of feelings” in the queer bodies and landscapes that have carried the violence of these geographies; Torilleras, Jotos, and Potaxies.
These inheritances also shape the exhibition’s central figures. The title itself gestures across generations of queer Brown language and world-making: tortilleras and joterías as reclaimed cultural identities and spaces, and potaxies as a playful nod to contemporary queer Latine meme culture and digital kinship.
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Leaning on the materiality of the sun-printing process of cyanotype, Cruz adds layers of aesthetic labor by processing these specific, marginalized landscapes on mirrors implicating viewers within the images themselves. Reflection becomes participation, expanding the borders of the landscape beyond the frame. These mirrored landscapes become the terrain upon which Cruz imagines a sacred trinity of la Tortillera, el Joto, y les Potaxie who carry these inherited “feelings” of dispossession in their queer bones.
If the mirrored landscapes hold histories of dispossession, the dance floor becomes the space where those histories are sublimated for a moment. Within these gatherings, dressing chunti, excessive, or being loud becomes an act of refusal. The dance floor becomes a sacred terrain where cultural memory is not abandoned, but rewritten.
Judy Rodriguez, Ph.D
Amina Cruz | Artist
Amina Cruz is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles, CA and teen years in Tampa, FL. She hitchhiked around the country before deciding to move to New York City, where she earned her BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. She also holds a MFA from University of California, Los Angeles.
Cruz’s photographs are utopias and landscapes filled with conversations, power, relationships, memories, joy, and fantasies that you can feel. Her interests are based in queer culture, film/analog photography, and exploring the space between transformation and identity. Her work has been exhibited at MOCA Tucson, San Diego Art Institute, Creative Center for Photography, The Getty, and galleries throughout the country. Cruz’s work is held in various private collections and institutions, including Loyola Marymount University, University of California, Santa Barbra, and The Getty.
Judy Rodriguez | Editorial Contributor
Judith Rodríguez is a first-generation scholar and assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies and the Latino Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to Black and Afro-Latiné feminism and literary and performance theory. Her first manuscript, titled Impositions: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Ricanness, explores works of literature, music, documentary film, and theatre and performance since the 1930s that have critiqued—and imagined alternatives to—the gendered antiblack violence produced through the imposition of ethnonational discourse on the colony of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. She has published or has forthcoming articles in Critical Times, Chiricú, small axe, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and Hispanófila: Ensayos de Literatura.
About the Curators
Aaron Gomez
Steve Galindo
- Past Events:
Sat, Nov 1 | Opening Reception
Saturday, November 1, 2025, 2–5 PM
Light refreshments will be provided.
Sat, Dec 6 | Archives Conversation
Saturday, December 6, 2025
2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Moderated by archivist and public historian Moriah Ulinskas, this conversation will address how artists and local organizations work with historical and community archives.
Speakers include:
Lylliam Posadas, co-founder and co-director of Your Neighborhood Museum; Keko Jackson, artist and archivist, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive; Leah King, artist; Camille Wong, artist.
The program concludes with a live music performance by Leah King at 4:00 p.m.
About the Panelists
Keko Jackson
Keko Jackson is an artist and archivist living in Los Angeles. His work extends across photography, curation, writing and publications that take a discursive approach to history and its relationship to images.
Leah King
Leah King is a multimedia artist working in collage, sound, film, and performance. Her intricately layered visual and sonic works explore race, gender, and power through a futurist lens. Centering archives as portals for future-building, King creates multisensory installations rooted in ancestral storytelling and community repair. As a vocalist and composer, she creates soundscapes influenced by house, gospel, and experimental jazz. King’s work has been exhibited at SFMOMA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and Charlie James Gallery, and supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Berlin Music Board, and many others. She holds an MFA from USC Roski School of Art and Design, where she researched house music and Black futurity, and a BA from Barnard College/Columbia University in Black diasporic music and dance.
Lylliam Posadas
Lylliam Posadas is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Your Neighborhood Museum and the Colonial Pathways Repatriation Manager at the Museum of Us. Lylliam has over 15 years of experience in repatriation and focuses on collaborative program development, community-led research practices, and transformative justice practices in museums. Lylliam has field experience in Ghana, Peru, Louisiana, and California, as well as experience facilitating repatriation, building repatriation programs, and guiding research protocols at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Autry Museum of the American West, and the Museum of Us. Lylliam received an M.Sc. in Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials from University College London and Bachelor degrees in Anthropology and Psychology from UCLA.
Moriah Ulinskas
Moriah Ulinskas is a community archivist and public historian whose research examines histories of dispossession, focusing on how marginalized communities organized to resist displacement and how that history of resistance lies latent in archival collections today. Her work investigates both the physical displacement of minority communities and their erasure from historical memory, examining how these groups preserved their stories despite systematic exclusion from official narratives. She is a founding member of the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW), a collective of audiovisual archivists who facilitate audiovisual preservation in community-held collections. Since 2011, CAW has collaborated with 65 organizations across four continents to conduct archival preservation workshops and kickstart community archives.
Camille Wong
Camille Wong (they/she) is a research-based artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Their practice examines power, geopolitics, and historiography through the lens of media and spectacle. They approach the gaze of ethnography by authoring the personal into the world through experimental documentary. Their recent work examines media and rhetoric during the Cold War, exploring how these broader political systems shaped global ideologies and immigration patterns. Their work has been shown at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has exhibited their work throughout Los Angeles including the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and Monte Vista Projects. They received their MFA in Media Art at UCLA and BAs in Art and Environmental Studies from UCSB.
Sat, Jan 17 | Artist & Curator Walkthrough
Saturday, January 17, 2026
2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Gain deeper insights into the exhibition through artist & curator walkthroughs, offered in 30-minute blocks.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Sat, Feb 21 | Performance Lectures
Saturday, February 21, 2026, 2–5 PM
Experience the work by the fifteen artists in the exhibition, and witness performance lectures by Artemisa Clark and Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai. Light refreshments will be provided. This is the last event in conjunction with the exhibition.
Exhibition Hours
Tuesday through Friday
12:00 p.m. – 5:00 PM, or by appointment
The gallery is closed on December 24, 2026 – January 3, 2027.
During stage presentations
Open 1 hour prior to start time
Parking
Parking is available on the top deck of Structure C, located directly in front of The Luckman.
Daily guest permits can be purchased at physical pay stations located in pay lots and through the PayByPhone App. These permits are virtual and require vehicle plate information.
If using PayByPhone, the location number for Structure C, Top level, is 4129.