Nao Bustamante will be the first major exhibition of Chicana cross-genre performance and installation artist Nao Bustamante (b.1969, San Joaquin Valley, CA), whose more than three decades of work challenge received notions of the exotic, feminism, queerness, and Latinidad. 

Nao Bustamante, America, The Beautiful, 2002 (performance view). Produced by the Third Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar: Globalization, Migration, and the Public Sphere, Lima, PE, July 5–13, 2002. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Lorie Novak

The survey will take its cue from an unrealized book project by the late scholar José Esteban Muñoz, Bustamante, and performance historian Ricardo Montez, which looked at “amateurism” as a tactic used by marginalized artists to critique systems of power. Hugo Cervantes will conduct archival research and interviews in order to contextualize and synthesize Bustamante’s practice, biography, and close relationship with a generation of academics including Jennifer Doyle and Tavia Nyong’o. Heeding the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery’s more than seven-decade-long mission to focus on underrepresented artists from the Los Angeles area, Cervantes aims to place Bustamante’s practice within a larger framework of performance art history, resisting chronological or taxonomic approaches in favor of a holistic mode of presentation.

Nao Bustamante: Soldadera, Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College (VPAM), Los Angeles, May 16–August 1, 2015. Courtesy VPAM. Photo: Dale Griner

Nao Bustamante, Sans Gravity, 1993–2003. Archival pigment print, edition of 10. Pictured: the artist and José Esteban Muñoz. Courtesy the artist

Hugo Cervantes is Curator of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG). He has held curatorial roles at Human Resources–Los Angeles (HRLA), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). While at LAND, he co-organized BLKNWS by Kahlil Joseph, a city-wide public art project included in Made in L.A. 2020: a version, and partnered with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to curate commissioned public art projects by Nico d’entremont and Julia Bogany, Megan Dorame, and iris yirei hu at the Los Angeles State Historic Park. He received a BA from the University of California, Riverside (2018), and an MA in Curatorial Practices from the University of Southern California (2022). 

Jaik Faulk, Acadiana Center for the Arts (AcA)