Gente Indigena teams with 83 Gallery for a colorful new exhibit

Jen Murillo has photography in her blood.

Both of her parents are camera obsessives, with Murillo sharing how on their first date in Colombia, the two went to a lab to process film together. “My whole life has been photography,” she said. 

But after graduating from CCAD, Murillo said her artistic drive flagged, and absent the sense of routine afforded by classes and all of the associated projects, she spent some time adrift. “It was really just me, and I started asking, well, what am I about? What do I want to show the world?” Murillo said in early October at 83 Gallery, where her work is part of an exhibition curated by Gente Indigena Collective, of which she is a member. (The exhibit, which coincides with Latine Heritage Month, opens on Saturday, Oct. 5.) “And what I’ve learned is sometimes you don’t necessarily have to have the deepest meaning, right? You just have to have fun with whatever you’re creating.”

Being part of Gente Indigena – a collective launched three years ago as a means to provide support and community for Latine artists of all stripes – has enabled Murillo to approach her work with a new sense of fearlessness, the photographer said, describing the close-knit group as an extended family. “There’s no judgment, nothing,” Murillo said. “So it’s just been really nice finding one another in the artist community and then building together.”

In addition to the annual Dia de los Muertos celebration – the next of which takes place on November 8 – the collective intends to more aggressively pursue exhibitions featuring the works of local Latine artists, aiming to expand showings outside of Latine Heritage Month, “because we’re Latino 365 days of the year,” said artist and group member Cat Ramos. “We exist all of the other months of the year.”

A pair of photos by Murillo on display at 83 Gallery are vaguely hallucinatory – inspired by a long-held fondness for album covers that range from Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy to Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, which she currently has hanging on the wall of her room at home. “I like funkiness. I like trippiness,” she said. “I like weird things.”

Ramos, who for years has focused her work on her ancestry – a trend that continued with a mural the artist recently completed near the Goodale Park freeway overpass in memory of her mother, who died three months ago – took a more outward view with one of the pieces on display in 83 Gallery. Completed in the early months of Israel’s ongoing siege in Gaza, the painting depicts a figure wearing a watermelon Lucha Libre wrestling mask and a Palestinian keffiyeh.

“Luchadores represent fighters – it literally means to fight – and the Palestinian people have such a resilient spirit. They are literally luchadores,” Ramos said. “So, I really wanted to embody both Mexican and Palestinian culture, because all walls have to go.”

Murillo and Ramos are just two of more than a dozen artists on display in the Gente Indigena exhibit, which itself falls inside part of a larger opening taking place at 83 Gallery on the same night. (Works by the Latine collective are concentrated in a room to the rear of the sprawling space.) And while the artists draw from a range of disciplines and represent an array of styles and approaches, both Murillo and Ramos were struck by some of the similarities on display in the space.

“I did notice we all tend to use bright colors, and we’re very vibrant in our colors,” Ramos said. “And I think that stems from our cultures. All of our barrios are very colorful. I know Colombia’s are colorful, Puerto Rico’s, Mexico’s. Maybe it resonates from childhood, or maybe it represents someplace we want to be. … It’s very interesting how all the work is similar, yet it’s all very different.”