ARTS/CULTURE
Lorena Molina
Photo by Tina Gutierrez for Movers & Makers
By Shauna Steigerwald
Life, Changing Art Leads To Life-Changing Art Reader version for devices
L
orena Molina may not be from the Midwest, but the Midwest has had a profound impact on her art. Fitting, then, that the University of Cincinnati assistant professor of art is one of 23 artists whose work will be on display in “The Regional,” billed as “the first major multimuseum survey dedicated to contemporary artists based in the Midwest.” Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, it will be on display at CAC from Dec. 10 to March 20. “The exhibition is kind of a snapshot of artists living and working in the Midwest,” said Amara Antilla, senior curator at the CAC and a Minnesota native. She co-curated the exhibition with Jade Powers at the Kemper, focusing on emerging artists. The featured artists have distinctive practices and diverse voices, Antilla said. “It’s not making any claims about what art in the Midwest necessarily is from a comprehensive perspective,” she said of the exhibition. Molina, whose work uses photography, video, performance and installation, is one of those voices. “Reconciliation Garden,” her immersive installation in “The Regional,” will be her second piece at the CAC. Her first, “Tu nombre entre nuestras lenguas,” was a performance, video and installation about a massacre in El Salvador. 10
DEC ’21/JAN ’22
Movers & Makers
“Home” for Molina is complicated. She spent her childhood in El Salvador and found her passion for art in California. But a difficult graduate school experience in the Midwest shaped her into the artist she is today.
Move to the Midwest feeds a passion Molina was 14 when she and her mother moved to Long Beach, Calif. Most of her family had already moved to the U.S. during El Salvador’s civil war. At 22, she took a photography class at her Southern California community college. “This class was life-changing,” she said. “I became obsessed … I don’t think I had experienced anything like that before. It was a little scary.” Molina went on to earn degrees in fine arts – a bachelor’s at Cal State Fullerton in 2012, then a master’s at the University of Minnesota in 2015. She came to Cincinnati in 2018 as a visiting assistant professor at UC’s DAAP and was later hired as an assistant professor. “To me, it feels kind of wild that I’m a college professor, thinking how … not even high school counselors thought they needed to talk to me about college,” she said. Molina felt welcomed by Cincinnati’s art community. “It feels like the least elitist art space or art community I’ve been a part of,” she said. “A lot of artists here in Cincinnati are my friends; we’re constantly supporting each other.” Her first experience living in the Midwest, for graduate school in Minnesota, was different.
Before that, her art was “really tender and gentle,” dealing with subjects like community. “Minnesota was the first place I really felt aware of my body, and specifically, my brown body … being the only person of color in these spaces a lot of the time,” she said. Molina was in graduate school when Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri. In classrooms, “We talked a lot about oppression ... but it just felt so academic,” she said. “It made me really upset to talk about these experiences in this way, like something that needed to be theorized, when a lot of the experiences were happening to the people I love and myself.” The experience radicalized her art: She channeled the sense that she didn’t belong into creating violent performances. “The work was asking (viewers) to really question their roles as accomplice in the suffering of others,” she said. Following a year-long hiatus from making art after graduate school, Molina started creating pieces about making a home in the margins. She also started experimenting with different techniques, connecting photography, video and objects in her work rather than seeing them as separate. When the CAC approached Molina about “The Regional,” she had a grant from ArtsWave and was already working on “Reconciliation Garden.” (It was on display at Wave Pool’s The Welcome Project from July 10 to Oct. 30. An iteration will move to “The Regional.”) It asks viewers to tap into their memories of