cynthia herrera
"womens Work"
As a Fulbright scholar in India working on Sustainable Development and Social Change, I began a project in collaboration with various NGO groups headed by women. SEWA a women's photography and video documentary production group, SEYVAYOOR a cultural arts center, Kolkata SANVED a women's dance group that created community workshops for women in trauma , an arts center in Delhi for children of women working in brothels, and finally collaborating with journalist Namita Kholi gave me a completely different perspective of empowered women in India. Not as victims and powerless as shown in media, but women creating resources to empower their communities. This became the focus for a photography portrait and oral history project. The focus of my work is on women's empowerment though cultural production. I will be shooting portraits and documenting the work of women leading NGO's that empower women via supporting their own production of art, media and community leadership. This work will continue here in the United States with young women. I hope to create an archive and on- line space with portraits and documented stories that will serve as a platform for exchange and dialogue.
As a 15 -year photography teacher, I envision this work to become an online resource that not only archives the histories and work of these incredible women, but will live as a space for dialogue, exchange and reciprocal teaching of technological skills and strategies for empowerment for women all over the world via on-line exchange. In my position as an art educator in collaboration with my students, we will be developing and implementing a program on women's empowerment through community engagement projects and workshops facilitated by the site that focuses on "women's cultural production," that will begin with engaging with the female leaders in India as mentors. Women's oral histories and cultural production become spaces of empowerment. We will develop a series of 3 community on -line workshops. These three workshops will photographically and orally document needs and resources for women in the community, spaces of empowerment for women, and the cultural production of women. The photographs and work funded by this grant will live as a dynamic and ever-changing archive, a workshop space for dialogue and exchange of knowledge, and an exhibition online and in both community and fine art spaces.
As a 15 -year photography teacher, I envision this work to become an online resource that not only archives the histories and work of these incredible women, but will live as a space for dialogue, exchange and reciprocal teaching of technological skills and strategies for empowerment for women all over the world via on-line exchange. In my position as an art educator in collaboration with my students, we will be developing and implementing a program on women's empowerment through community engagement projects and workshops facilitated by the site that focuses on "women's cultural production," that will begin with engaging with the female leaders in India as mentors. Women's oral histories and cultural production become spaces of empowerment. We will develop a series of 3 community on -line workshops. These three workshops will photographically and orally document needs and resources for women in the community, spaces of empowerment for women, and the cultural production of women. The photographs and work funded by this grant will live as a dynamic and ever-changing archive, a workshop space for dialogue and exchange of knowledge, and an exhibition online and in both community and fine art spaces.
cypress street barrio, Orange ca.
pacific standard time
getty exhibition
guggenheim gallery
chapman univeristy
project bici
riverside art museum
Project Bici
is a photographic and archival work that will engage with the Eastside neighborhood of Riverside Ca. Created and Directed by artist Cynthia Herrera in collaboration with the Riverside Art Museum and Antena artist collective, the project is taking place over a 10 week period, from February to March of 2017. Stories From the Eastside project will set up a mobile space via the Antena bike book Movil where community members can tell, write and archive histories by creating books, sharing stories and performing live readings as a form of empowerment. Based in envisioning and writing the future of the eastside community, this project will take place in various community spaces and is specifically interested in repurposing alleyways.
The Movil will engage with families living along the alleys of the Eastside in envisioning the future of the alleys and the community. Re-purposing alleyways from centers of violence and discarded remnants of the community, these spaces will become centers for creative exchange and community art spaces.
Finally, the goal for this engagement is for the project to result in sustainable spaces along the alley ways that begin with stories of the present community , but also in creating and envisoned future via photographic exhibitions and story telling and writing. In this envisioned future, residents along with museum support, hope to repurpose the alley ways as spaces for interaction and creating new stories and histories of the community
is a photographic and archival work that will engage with the Eastside neighborhood of Riverside Ca. Created and Directed by artist Cynthia Herrera in collaboration with the Riverside Art Museum and Antena artist collective, the project is taking place over a 10 week period, from February to March of 2017. Stories From the Eastside project will set up a mobile space via the Antena bike book Movil where community members can tell, write and archive histories by creating books, sharing stories and performing live readings as a form of empowerment. Based in envisioning and writing the future of the eastside community, this project will take place in various community spaces and is specifically interested in repurposing alleyways.
The Movil will engage with families living along the alleys of the Eastside in envisioning the future of the alleys and the community. Re-purposing alleyways from centers of violence and discarded remnants of the community, these spaces will become centers for creative exchange and community art spaces.
Finally, the goal for this engagement is for the project to result in sustainable spaces along the alley ways that begin with stories of the present community , but also in creating and envisoned future via photographic exhibitions and story telling and writing. In this envisioned future, residents along with museum support, hope to repurpose the alley ways as spaces for interaction and creating new stories and histories of the community
Making Ground 2015
“Site exists not only in physical and spatial terms, but as a cultural framework.” (Miwon Kwon)
In Making Ground, site is that very “cultural framework,” that addresses space through knowledge and historical narratives of the local community.
In the last edges of the Orange Groves of Riverside, family run nursery is the site for this project. Dealing with the encroachment of track housing development, "Making Ground" is both a photographic and community based work in collaboration with Gloria and Celestino Garcia of Gloria's Nursery.
Making Ground exists to acknowledge community spaces as counter hegemonic in daily practice and consumption. This work is a community collaboration that seeks to reframe the concept of authorship of knowledge and site through language and exchange of practice.
In the heart of Riverside's Orange Groves and last remaining greenbelt, this documentary work based in Photography, oral histories, and community projects is agency and authorship in the hands of community members.
In Making Ground, site is that very “cultural framework,” that addresses space through knowledge and historical narratives of the local community.
In the last edges of the Orange Groves of Riverside, family run nursery is the site for this project. Dealing with the encroachment of track housing development, "Making Ground" is both a photographic and community based work in collaboration with Gloria and Celestino Garcia of Gloria's Nursery.
Making Ground exists to acknowledge community spaces as counter hegemonic in daily practice and consumption. This work is a community collaboration that seeks to reframe the concept of authorship of knowledge and site through language and exchange of practice.
In the heart of Riverside's Orange Groves and last remaining greenbelt, this documentary work based in Photography, oral histories, and community projects is agency and authorship in the hands of community members.
Pasado Presente Riverside 2014
Grounded in empowering community as a space of existing cultural production, Pasado Presente is a community engagement project on various sites in Riverside Ca as part of an artist residency for the Riverside Art Museum's ART MAKE social practice series. Artists Martin Sanchez and Cynthia Herrera and community members collaborate in archiving and creating culture from everyday materials and practices. In collaboration Sanchez and Garcia proprietors and sculptors, and Herrera, photographer/archivist, work together to create a space for the community to share personal histories and produce artworks.
‘Aber 2013' Mathaf Museum of Contemporary Art Doha, Qatar Engage Contextualize A youth engagement project created within the framework of community engagement displayed within the museum context. 60 youth hailing from Doha, Portland and Los Angeles engage in a conversation about culture, identity, misconceptions and intersections. Through a 7-day exchange of language and experience, youth shift from place to place in Qatar as does their individual and collective experience. Informed by the city, desert and each other, these 10 works are the production of conversation, collaboration and movement. This experience of flux is one shared as their own emerging multi-ethnic communities negotiate existing and pre-existing histories to find an identity. These young artists have created 10 graffiti art panels to voice their experience of exchange and their unique perspectives. Photography, calligraphy and graffiti merge on each canvas to empower youth as cultural producers of the now, the contemporary and the temporal. Juxtaposed with calligraphy, these artworks embody the intersections of two cultural icons communicating contemporary issues of cultural identity and globalization.
You Are Here
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“ The practice of everyday life determines the terms of the space.” ( Michel DeCerteau)
In collaboration with youth, community members and local artists, The You Are Here Project documents and intervenes in sites of daily practice. As an art collaborative, through photography and sound, we document living monuments to reveal the intersections of pre-existing and existing histories in an effort archive “ourselves.” Through this work we create spaces of exchange and dialogue and possibilities for new encounters.
In collaboration with ASITESPACE, a traveling sound booth serves as our context from which to start community dialogue and exchange. Our collaborations include local artists, Slanguage Studios, Inner City Arts , Cal State University Long Beach Arabic Studies Program and Oral History Program, and the City of Bell . Through these collaborations we document community spaces, broadcast stories through our mobile sound booth and conduct art workshops in and around these sites.
Cross Atlantic Media Project Fulbright , Morocco 2012
Youth from Los Angeles and Morocco look at the exotification of culture and identity through popular media. Series of online collaborations, these two Hollywoods’ across the Atlantic filter popular culture in an effort to create their own representations.
cuba: Prima, postalitas y hogar
"The second type of work responds to either real-world concerns or experience. The hyper-real, digital inkjet prints from the series, Controlled Humidity by Cynthia Herrera elucidate this category. Herrera mines the politicized nature of the refrigerator in Cuba. The restriction of personal freedom is expressed in her fridge-sized photographs of the containment unit, isolating the food, crumbs, and liquid pools of goo in sublime fashion. Herrera notes that this space not only stores necessary foodstuff, but also often conceals forbidden products, such as red meat. Rather than just deliver a one-sided critique of the Cuban political structure as oppressive, the “contraband” meat functions as a mark of personal liberation and a form of agency that suggests the presence of other subversive actions."