Nube Cruz

CON EL NOPAL EN LA FRENTE

Mar 3 – Mar 16, 2024

Nube Cruz’s Window Dressing installation, Con El Nopal En La Frente (With the Nopal on the Forehead), is a

physical manifestation of their ongoing exploration of Nopal Futurity, an art practice that (re)mixes older

indigenous technologies and the idea of Indigenous Futurity with a cuir/queer indigena perspective. Recognizing

that Amerindigenous peoples have already been living in a post-apocalyptic world since 1492, Cruz’s work seeks to

activate the potential for contemporary liberation through the historical reconstruction, and innovative

development, of (new) Indigena cosmologies. By excavating the historical invisibility of native people’s

advancement of, and contribution to, the technologies of modern society, Cruz hopes to disrupt the standard

Western modernist narrative in order to rematriate, retrieve, and reconstruct images and obliterate the borders,

legalities, histories, objects, resources, and bodies that have otherwise been co-opted by the colonial gaze.

Through sculpture, photography, and performative video documentation, invoking what they call ‘indigie-archivist

research,’ their installation will begin the necessary conversation on how the possibilities and potentialities of

indigenous futures might be engaged and activated.

Nube Cruz is and artist and activist currently completing their BFA degree at UCLA. They have exhibited in numerous group exhibitions,

including We Are Made of the Earth, Our Skin Says So at A+R+T Gallery in Los Angeles, The Aesthetics of Undocumentedness at Dalton

Gallery in Altanta, and The Latinx Project at NYU in New York. The have been a Native American Arts Grantee through the San Francisco

Queer Arts Foundation and Galereria de la Raza and have served as an assistant researcher on the UCLA Indigenous Mapping Project. They

also work transnationally with indigenous activists in Mexico.