KATHYA MARIA LANDEROS Dulce

Friday, May 6 - Sunday, May 8, 2022

Opening reception: Friday, May 6, 6 - 8:30PM

KATHYA MARIA LANDEROS (Mexican-American, b. 1977)

Kathya Maria Landeros is a Mexican-American photographer and educator. Influenced by her bi-cultural upbringing, her work of over fifteen years focuses on Latinx communities and the exploration of history, migration, representation and belonging. 

Her research has been supported through fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Fulbright, and residencies at the Rayko Photo Center and the Center for Photography at Woodstock where she created the self-published artist book titled Verdant Land. The book was included in the traveling group exhibition titled Race, Love, and Labor, curated by art historian Sarah Lewis, and is in the permanent collection at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally, most recently at Aperture Foundation in New York City and through the San Francisco Arts Commission in a group exhibition of women photographers working in the American West.

She received a dual undergraduate degree in English literature and Hispanic studies from Vassar College and graduate degree in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Prior to joining the faculty at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and a Knafel Assistant Professor of Humanities, she taught at public institutions of higher education in northern California and Massachusetts.

Within my family narrative there are many accounts of generational migration from Mexico. Hardworking kinfolk emigrated to the United States in search of economic opportunity. My family’s legacy of migration, not uncommon and united in a country shaped by immigrants, has driven my desire to make photographs in Latinx immigrant communities over the past fifteen years.

These bodies of work include Verdant Land and West, both focused around agricultural communities and the immigrant populations that serve as their lifelines. 

This chapter of work, titled Dulce, reinterprets my early years growing up in the suburban edges of Sacramento next to corn fields. Defined by long summer nights, my abuelita watching us while my parents worked evening shifts, riding bikes outside, chasing after the ice cream truck, I realize that it was a pretty idyllic childhood. 

We were first generation immigrants and moving into a suburban tract home development meant we were achieving a measure of upward mobility. It was living the American Dream, and one that has often been represented photographically through photographs of suburban culture and through the television shows I grew up watching. Yet, I never saw my exact version of that reality described. Dulce is my rendering of this – a Latinx family, sweet and full of aspiration for who we are as U.S. Americans.