Curator Talk with Yehimi Cambron and Artists Tatiana Bell and Lucero “Pato” Muñoz Vázquez

Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and public speaker born in Michoacán, México. She immigrated to Georgia at seven, grew up undocumented in Atlanta, and has been a DACA recipient since 2013.

Cambrón’s work explores the nuances of undocumentedness and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation. Through public art, she has served as a monument-maker asserting the humanity of immigrants in Atlanta, claiming barren walls to paint landmarks that belong to undocumented people. Her work institutes a space for immigrants within the South's dominant racial binary. From her first mural on Buford Hwy to her mural at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, she confronts the idea of who is worthy of public celebration in the home of the largest Confederate monument in the nation. She has worked to complicate the immigrant narrative beyond murals through portraits and site-specific installations. Cambrón has had solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina’s Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), and has exhibited at Agnes Scott College's Dalton Gallery, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the High Museum of Art.

Cambrón received a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) fully funded by the Goizueta Foundation. In 2015, she became an educator and one of the first Teach for America DACAmented Corps Members placed in Georgia. Two years later, she returned to Cross Keys High School, her alma mater, to teach art. In 2019, Cambrón left the classroom to pursue art full-time. She is completing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a recipient of the 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and is expanding her practice into fibers, sculpture, and discarded materials from her family's commercial furniture-making practice in Atlanta.

Tatiana Bell (she/any) is an Atlanta-born-and-raised artist and interaction designer whose work is informed by their queer mixed-race identity, the spaces we occupy, and the land that sustains us. She explores playfulness where it is lacking with a keen focus on neglected spaces and people, building meaningful and mystical experiences that encourage a sense of patient exploration, teaching lessons of hope and wonder to those who engage. Through giving new life to saved materials, they create environments that feel safe and accessible to all, honoring the self in relation to the surrounding world.

Lucero “Pato” Muñoz Vázquez (She/her) (b. 1998) is an indigenous Mexican artist nomadically based in the USA and born in Progreso de Obregon, Hidalgo, Mexico. At the age of 4, she became an undocumented immigrant along with her mother, father, and older brother. They immigrated to the Deep South.

Pato’s work explores the nuances of being a queer DACAmented immigrant, having grown up in Gwinnett County, Georgia (aka the deep south). With her most recent work, after having a pivotal homecoming to her hometown in Mexico, she began exploring beadwork through a fusion of indigenous and contemporary practices.

Through different techniques her work represents resistance towards the violent lingering effects of colonialism. She challenges the conventional notions of assimilation by disrupting the norm she was taught to follow out of fear of being undocumented, immigrant, and brown.