Brown Futurity: Artists and Their Archives
Brown Futurity: Artists and Their Archives brings together artists and archivists for a timely and urgent conversation about preservation, authorship, and legacy. This public panel centers artists and explores archives as powerful tools for storytelling, self-determination, and cultural futurity.
The discussion features Xaviera Flores, Librarian and Archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and artist and cultural worker Sandra de la Loza. Together, they will examine how artists can build, protect, and activate their archives as living documents of creative practice.
Designed to give artists agency over the long-term impact of their work, the panel serves both as a practical guide and a conceptual exploration. Participants will learn about archival tools and resources available to artists—including record management strategies, documentation practices, and approaches to organizing a lifetime of work. The conversation will also address how artists engage archives as part of their artistic practice, reshaping memory and history through self-authored narratives.
As the first event in a two-part series, Brown Futurity invites participants to think expansively about legacy. Securing one’s archive becomes not only a logistical task, but an intentional act of history-making, futurity, and storytelling.
First Look at Rooted Voices Exhibition
Prior to the panel, guests are invited to a special first look at Rooted Voices, a student-led exhibition at the MXCL BNL LAB (6545 Greenleaf Ave., Whittier) beginning at 1:30 p.m. Organized by students from Whittier College, the exhibition features artists from Whittier and surrounding communities whose works center stories shaped by place, labor, migration, ritual, and shared experience. The MXCL BNL LAB also houses the MexiCali Biennial’s archive, with select items on display. Following the preview, attendees will walk together to Whittier College for the 3:00 p.m. Brown Futurity: Artists and Their Archives panel in Hoover 100. The walk is approximately 10 minutes in duration. The LAB will close at 2:30 p.m. for its staff to be able to attend Brown Futurity. Learn more about Rooted Voices HERE.
About Whittier College and Brown Voices / StoryLab
Whittier College is one of the most diverse liberal arts colleges in the nation and is designated as both a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and Minority-Serving Institution (MSI). Located in Whittier, California, the College is committed to academic excellence, civic engagement, and inclusive, interdisciplinary scholarship.
The Brown Voices / StoryLab initiative, supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, advances innovative experiential pedagogy and research that amplifies stories reflecting the complexity and expansiveness of “brown” identity in the United States. Led by faculty in Art and History, the program centers storytelling, intersectionality, and public humanities as tools for cultural understanding and social engagement.
Xaviera Flores is the Librarian and Archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. The center is dedicated to the development of scholarly research on the Chicano-Latino population and Flores is integral to this mission. She oversees all library, archives, and museum services, including outreach, instruction, grant projects, and donor relations. She also works closely with students and partner organizations to build stronger ties between community and UCLA.
Sandra de la Loza’s research-based practice investigates the underlayers of our present landscape as a means to open portals and envision future worlds through the exercise of collective memory and political imagination. She is the founder of The Pochx Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, an on-going collaborative project that engages the subject of “History” through critical inquiry and artistic processes. For the last two decades her work has approached History as site and subject and has grown into archival, social and site-specific investigations and immersive installations. Her interest in the silences, exclusions and erasures of the past is in what it reveals of the present, and how these “ghosts” can make visible erased histories, unlock the imagination, and create counter memories for the future. She is an Assistant Professor in Chicanx Studies at the California State University at Northridge.