Mercedes Dorame

About

Mercedes Dorame is a multi-disciplinary artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction and ancestral connection to land and sky. Born in Los Angeles, California, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. 

Dorame’s work is in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Triton Museum, among others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from organizations such as Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies. 

She is currently regular faculty at CalArts in the Photo Media Program, and was commissioned by the Getty for her sculptural installation Woosha’aaxre Yaangaro as the inaugural Rotunda Commission. Her work is also on view in the Borderlands exhibition at the Huntington Library. Her work and story were recently explored in the Los Angeles Times article “How artist Mercedes Dorame shares pieces of her Tongva heritage across L.A.’s public landscapes”, and she was honored by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative “UCLA: Our Stories Our Impact” as an outstanding alumni working in equal justice over the last 100 years. She has shown her work internationally.

Artist Statement

I am a visual artist based in my ancestral homelands of Tovaangar, which is more commonly known as Los Angeles. I grew up playing on hillsides of southern California, getting to know the deer trails and the smell of the grasses in the summertime, learning when the water flows through the creeks and when to look out for rattlesnakes. I call on these learned and ancestral connections to the land to explore the problematics of visibility and cultural construction and connection to place. 

I create installations to remember and re-imagine the land and sky as Indigenous. I ask that we remember the ground we walk on, and who the original caretakers are, and I also remind us to look up. 

I create a permanent record of Indigenous presence in a city that sought to erase us. I create body relationships with the cosmos, using markers in the night sky as navigational tools.  Each project I work on is an outpouring of intense focus and connection, pulling from ancestral ties and research and moving it all into the realm of the future. 

My work is an expression of all of these overlays of experience, of moving through the land and sky as an Indigenous person, being called a trespasser on my homelands, and reconciling how to work through these experiences in an empowered way. 

I collaborate with the land and cosmos to empower the expansion of perception, experience, and imagination and insist on removing Native people from the past tense and re-imagining our decolonized sovereign future.

mercedesdorame@gmail.com | +1.415.952.7697