Indigenous artists on reclaiming authenticity at the 'Future Imaginaries' exhibition
March 13, 2025
The Autry Museum's “Future Imaginaries” exhibit brings together works by Indigenous artists to reimagine science fiction characters and storylines. In this story from PBS News Student Reporting Labs, Mercedes Dorame and Angelica Trimble-Yanu met to discuss their work and how contemporary Native artists draw upon their culture and connections to envision possible futures.
Watch here.
LACMA exhibition highlights religion, culture and the cosmos - USC Annenberg Media
October 16, 2024
“As you enter the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s newest venture you hear a 1918 recording of the Tongva people, overlayed with the signing of two contemporary Tongva, Mercedes Dorame and her daughter.
Dorame, an artist and educator, is the creator of “Portal for Tovaangar,” a piece featured in the museum’s exhibition “Mapping The Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures” opening Sunday.” - Matthew Royer
Read the full article here.
Mercedes Dorame: ‘Borders shift and change with perspective’ - The Art Newspaper
February 29, 2024
Interview with The Art Newspaper.
The artist’s commission for the Getty Center’s rotunda replicates the forms and colours of abalone shells that were once ubiquitous on the Los Angeles coast.
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“Where Sky Touches Water” presents Indigenous perspective on nature at Oxy Arts - The Occidental
February 21, 2024
Oxy Arts hosted the opening event of artist Mercedes Dorame’s exhibition “Where Sky Touches Water” Feb. 8. Students, community members and Dorame’s friends and family attended, observing a combination of photographic and sculptural art depicting components of the natural world. The gallery includes close-up photographs of rocks and seashells, geometric and pottery-like sculptures and glass panels printed with organic patterns.
Read the full article here.
“Where Sky Touches Water” opens at OxyArts - News from Native California
February 9, 2024
“Another successful opening for OxyArts as LA-based artist Mercedes Dorame (Tongva) took center stage with a combination of her photography and sculpture on display in a new show entitled Where Sky Touches Water. The exhibit explores “the profound beauty of the natural world” through Dorame’s perspective and connection to her ancestral homelands. As noted in the press release from Oxy Arts, this exhibition was greatly influenced by Dorame’s field research on the Channel Islands.”
Read the full article here.
Tongva Artist Mercedes Dorame Reinterprets Ancient Traditions - Visit California
Despite growing up on the Southern California coast, Dorame had never seen abalone living in the wild. So when Dorame visited the Getty to look at the rotunda with Rand, she proposed what might seem an unlikely concept for her installation: giant abalone.
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Diving In - UCLA Magazine
April 2, 2024
Titled “Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back),” the installation features giant abalone shells suspended from the ceiling; a 180-degree painted canvas drum; and iridescent drapes over the curved windows directly below. To experience the work is to plunge into an ideological underwater scene off Catalina’s shores, looking back at the range of the Tongva coastline from southern Malibu to northern Orange County.
Read the full article here.
Bringing Ocean to Land - Getty Magazine
June 21, 2023
Tucked among a row of truck repair shops, steel fabricators, and the Union Pacific railyard in Commerce, you’ll find an unexpected workspace: artist Mercedes Dorame’s studio, with art supplies piled on tables and photos of loved ones tacked to the walls.
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Art made on Tongva land highlights past, present, future - KCRW
September 12, 2023
“The Iridescence of Knowing” opens this week at Occidental College, highlighting creations — such as historical craftwork and performance art — made on Tongva land. Mercedes Dorame and Joel “Rage.One” Garcia are the curators, bringing together artists from across generations.
“We're trying to give the viewer entryway, an invitation, but also a provocation to know us, to not think of the Tongva people as something that exists in the past or in a history book,” says Dorame.
Read the full article here.
On Top of the World - Artillery Mag
September 5, 2023
At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all.
“Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yang’aro (Looking Back),” the inaugural installation for the Getty’s Rotunda Commission series, marks the museum’s first solo presentation by an Indigenous Californian from the Los Angeles basin and the southern Channel Islands, the ancestral land on which the Getty Center was erected in 1997.
Read the full article here.
How artist Mercedes Dorame shares pieces of her Tongva heritage across L.A.'s public landscapes - LA Times
July 6, 2022
“Her work, in quiet ways, illuminates how Indigenous life and thought remain present in Los Angeles and its landscapes. The spring she has taken me to is a spot that her father, Tongva elder Robert Dorame, took her to when she was a child. It is a place that was part of her family’s story and that is now her story, a story she will pass on to her daughter. That vitality, that lineage, is something she seeks to embody in her images.”
Read the full article here.
California in a State of Creative Incubation - Frieze
February 2022
Marko Gluhaich profiles five figures leading the charge in education in Los Angeles and beyond, from Catherine Opie to Mercedes Dorame.
Mercedes Dorame’s practice bridges two former careers: student photojournalist and cultural consultant. The latter describes a position she held during and after pursuing her undergraduate degree, when she would travel across Los Angeles County to construction sites at burial grounds on the unceded land of the Gabrielino-Tongva — a native people to which Dorame belongs — and advise workers on what to do with the Indigenous artefacts they found there. As a student, Dorame learned how little documentation there is of the Gabrielino-Tongva, who remain unrecognized by the US federal government, and has since worked to bridge the gaps in the sparse history that has been recorded.
Read the full article here.
LACMA × Snapchat: The Monumental Perspectives Podcast
September 2021
This podcast series is inspired by the LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives initiative that uses augmented reality to explore monuments and murals, representation, and history. Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create virtual monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. This initiative is made possible by Snapchat. Additional support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information visit lacma.org/monumental
Listen here.
DEEP ROUTES Episode 12: Songs from Tovaangar - dublab
October 9, 2023
Los Angeles has resonated with song long before electronic recording. This episode traces the city’s audio origins back to its First Peoples, the Tongva. Learn how this Indigenous community stays attuned to cultural practice while envisioning new pathways. On this episode of Deep Routes, L. Frank, The Calderon family, Moira and Wallace Cleaves, Mercedes and Robert Dorame tell stories that will help you listen more deeply to Los Angeles. This is Deep Routes, Songs from Tovaangar.
Listen here.
Multimedia Artist Mercedes Dorame to Deliver the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture 2022 Commencement Keynote Address
May 16, 2022
Native American Indigenous artist and UCLA alumna Mercedes Dorame will deliver the keynote address at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture’s 2022 commencement on Saturday, June 11th at 4 p.m. This will be the first commencement ceremony to be held in-person since 2019.
Dorame, a multimedia artist whose work encompasses photography, sculptural installations, and sound art, is a member of the Tongva people. Her heritage connects her deeply to the landscape of California, and her practice explores what it means to be a Native inhabitant of contemporary Tovaangar (present-day Los Angeles).
Read the full article here.
What is Feminist Art - Now: 2019 Exhibition
In 1977, feminist activists Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven organized an exhibition centered on the question, “What is Feminist Art?” They invited artists to answer this question on a letter-sized piece of paper. Hundreds of artists responded in the form of collage, manifestos, drawings, and prints, providing a snapshot of the ongoing conversations around feminism in the United States.
In 2019, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art asked this same question, “What is Feminist Art?” to some of the same women who responded in 1977, as well as a new group of artists to capture the current response.
On view are more than 75 responses from then and now. These personal statements are vibrant and varied, elucidating the contours of feminist art by complicating its origins, calling out its failures, and celebrating its achievements.
This exhibition was organized by the Archives of American Art with funding from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.
Read the full press release here.
The Map and the Territory: 100 Years of Collecting at UCLA
October 22, 2021
The Map and the Territory distills the vast holdings of UCLA’s diverse collections into a single exhibition. Some 160 representative objects tell stories and make new meanings in exciting and unexpected ways. Organized by the Fowler Museum in partnership with the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Library, and featuring works from additional campus collections, the exhibition juxtaposes rare books and manuscripts, historic prints, contemporary paintings and drawings, abstract animations, ceramics, musical instruments, bird and animal specimens, meteorites, and more. Together, these seemingly disparate things invite you to explore the world, its communities, and the universe beyond. The Map and the Territory serves as a guide to the valuable place these collections hold in the history of UCLA’s pursuit of knowledge in our global society.
Read the full article here.
When I Remember I See Red - American Indian Art and Activism in California
This exhibition features Native California artists who have used their work as a means of cultural resistance and renewal. Many have helped—and continue to help—restore aspects of ceremony, dance, language, and material culture once in danger of disappearing. Several facilitate workshops, teaching the next generation, and curate exhibitions consisting of work by their peers. Some of the pieces displayed are explicitly political in content, but in general aim more to reverse erasure and invisibility while reasserting Native values and sovereignty. Collectively, the artists in this exhibition practice a version of activism that combines elements of traditional and contemporary society to call out racial and social injustice and to heal communities through cultural renewal.
Read the full press release here.
Photo Flux: Unshuttering Los Angeles
Organized by jill moniz, Consulting Curator at the Getty, Photo Flux presents an important selection of work by radical photographers working in Los Angeles. Many of these artists are cultural makers and their views about and through the lens are transforming photography from its racializing past into a medium that simultaneously engenders aesthetics and agency. Describing a movement to expand how race, class and gender are constructed, signified and normalized, Photo Flux will highlight artists who have challenged and changed the medium, from how they interpret, describe, and record imagery to their insistence that their work be accessible to viewers who look like them.
Read the full press release here.
Portal for Tovaangar - Monumental Perspectives
Working in landscapes she feels anchored to, Mercedes Dorame reclaims connection to the land and ancestral knowledge by exploring what it means to exist as a Native inhabitant of contemporary Tovaangar (Los Angeles). Portal for Tovaangar creates an immersive portal that links past, present, and potential future worlds. Viewers engage with what continues to inspire many Native people: the sky, the land, indigenous plant life, celestial bodies, and the infinite ability to connect to these entities and with each other. This work proposes a community healing opportunity, an exploration of truth in understanding Indigenous intrinsic knowledge, and reconciliation. Portal for Tovaangar shifts away from memorializing heroes and singular events to engage the continued and future presence of Native people in this city.
The song included in the piece is inspired by a 1918 wax cylinder recording of Tongva singing:
Kotiikawooken papaaxiiwo | Red-winged blackbird
Yakeenax nechoova yakenax | Dance with me
chawaayavet, chawaayavet | With outstretched wings
Watch the full video here.
Creative Capital Awardee 2020
Mercedes Dorame creates an immersive installation addressing contemporary interpretation of Native Tongva ceremony and our relationship to celestial movements, eclipses, and solstices. The installation includes the creation of a semi-enclosed, domed immersive space, recordings of Tongva music, photograms, and cast concrete sculptures.
Watch the full video here.