La Gente de Santa Monica: In Honor of Latinx, Afro-Latin, Asian-Latinos & Hispanic Heritage Month is a celebratory art curation and citywide art banner campaign depicting "La Gente." This initiative, supported by the City of Santa Monica, features works by contemporary artists who, through art-making and storytelling, celebrate the achievements and contributions of Mexican, Afro-Latin, Latinx, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities, both past and present.

The project aims to reinvigorate the broader community with a sense of shared belonging to a rich historical culture. La Gente is a Santa Monica citywide exhibition that begins on August 22, 2024. It is produced by local practitioners, curators, and gallerists, in collaboration with local partners and supporters, to present a public space activation leading up to Latine and Indigenous Heritage Month, observed from September 15 to October 15, 2024.

In the spirit of collectiveness, an Open Call was issued to local Santa Monica and LA County artists, inviting them to engage with the history of La Gente. The resulting exhibition, curated by Steve Galindo (@THESTYLEGUYDE), will be showcased at DORADO 806 PROJECTS from August 22 to September 4, 2024. It will focus on artwork by local Santa Monica artists in conversation with LA County and national artists of Mexican, Afro-Latin, Latinx, Hispanic, and Indigenous descent, honoring both the present and the past.

This project was made possible by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.

A Letter from the Curator:

La Gente is a representation of the people, its land, and the collective memories and traumas of its children. Representative of a conversation that centers around belonging without borders and restrictions to fitting into a box in the census which doesn't give us one, a nuevo collectivity emerges with a connection to the ancestral, humanity and close regard to colonization of our peoples.  

With this in mind, we invite you to fuse these notions into the future narrative of collectivity. One breaking borders divides, and separative narratives to create unified hope for the peoples of all diasporas. We begin that dialogue by highlighting La Gente where we try to include the diasporas in BIPOC to demonstrate the complexity of Latinidad. Through inclusivity to hybridity, we may begin to mimic the model and conceptualize world citizenship across cities, municipalities, and lands.