To Rise Above Ruins

In Spring of 2025, a survey of my work will be exhibited at the Riverside Art Museum from March-September in the two galleries on the upper level of the museum:

“To Rise Above Ruins” takes inspiration from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who ruminates over the ways cultures persist under the threat of erasure. Photographer Tamara Cedré builds her work upon this notion of the remaking and reassembly of cultures from fragmental memory by bringing together archival and new images to conjure what Walcott calls a “visual echo of history.” 

The exhibition engages past and present, to create a photographic commons for Cedré and the communities she calls home in Puerto Rico and Southern California to understand how land has been used and shaped. Projects featured include Cedré’s work, El Suspiro de la Historia, in which she responds to federally sponsored FSA imagery depicting Puerto Rico, to question the ongoing impacts of the island’s colonial status.

“To Rise Above Ruins” also features Cedré’s current projects in Southern California that continue her examination of land-use policies as ongoing colonial practice. These include her photographic and filmic works documenting the route of a supply chain that has largely subsisted on Latinx labor and currently threatens the health of the residents who live and  work in these frontline communities.

—Dr. Catherine Gudis

Live from the Frontline

In cooperation with A People’s History of the I.E. , Live from the Frontline, is a participatory public memory project I am leading that invites artists into the archives and the landscapes of logistics to create site-specific works that explore the roots of environmental racism. The project includes eight sites located in Riverside and San Bernardino where long histories of colonialism and extraction from the land and labor are palpable, offering opportunities to reflect on what the curators call “the slow violence of the supply chain.”

This summer, my solo show on Colton and Fontana will debut at the California Museum of Photography from
June-October on the lower level of the museum near the archives! I will be giving a public talk and screening of my new short at the museum on October 13th.

A Q/A panel with responses from me can be found here and a thoughtful review of the exhibition by Dr. April Baca can be read in CARLA’s Winter Issue/# 38 here.