Mujeres de Archivo
Mujeres de Archivo, an exhibition featuring the work of three Latinx women artists, deploys a decolonial and feminist approach to archiving, foregrounding memory work, an ongoing history of overlooked labor and knowledge across the Americas. Working across mediums such as textile, print, and sculpture, the exhibition centers archival fragments both inherited and imagined.
Through ceramic engagements with water, embroidered figures, and vernacular dictionaries of herbal medicine, the artists propose alternative modes of documentation that are at once intimate and collective. Their works expose the absences and violences embedded in institutional histories while constructing new frameworks of remembrance grounded in care, diasporic experience, speculation, and resistance.
C.J. Chueca’s ceramic swimming pools reckon with water as a site of memory, using both presence and absence (as seen in the empty pools of each diptych) to reflect on loss and what endures. Cinthya Santos Briones’ Herbolario Migrante, a collaborative dictionary of herbal remedies, emerges from workshops with migrant women, positioning knowledge as shared and lived. Blanka Amezkua’s vibrant embroideries reclaim forms of labor historically dismissed as “women’s work,” asserting their cultural and material significance in their subject matter of women’s bodies themselves.
Grounded in Latinx feminist scholarship, the exhibition frames memory work as both a political and aesthetic intervention, particularly within a heightened anti-immigrant climate. It asks: What does it mean to transmit memory across borders and generations? How might archives open space for speculation, for alternate pasts and futures? How can we revalue processes and repetitions often marginalized in archival practice?
Ultimately, Mujeres de Archivo proposes archiving not only as preservation, but as creation. By positioning Latinx women as archivists of the everyday, the exhibition reclaims archival authority and foregrounds overlooked modes of knowledge transmission. It creates a space where memory is not only preserved, but reactivated, where history becomes a living record shaped by those long written out of it.
Exhibition runs May 14 -June 21, 2026
RSVP for Opening Reception May 14th 6-8pm
Our “face” to the community, and the city at large, is our exhibitions program. BRAC’s exhibitions are designed to affect cultural and social change through art that is both innovative and educational. We support our guest curators to present fresh arts experiences to the Bronx while nurturing our local talent. A focus of our vision is to blur the lines between professional art practice and community self-expression. Many of the artists we show embrace a social-practice mode of operation that is as much about making a sociopolitical statement as it is about creating a resonant visual experience. For each exhibit, we include community engagement activities such as tours, panels, and workshops, as well as mixers and virtual art productions that align with the pulse of our community.