Armando Minjarez

[ PROJECT DIRECTOR | CURATOR ]

@_delnorte  |  www.ArmandoMinjarez.com

Armando Minjarez is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist, designer, and community organizer. His practice is guided by themes of displacement, collaboration, and empowerment to open spaces for the development of social change strategy, creative expression, and resistance. He is the founder of ICT ARMY of Artists and the co-founder of the local nonprofit The Seed House~La Casa de Semilla and the NorthEnd Urban Arts Festival.

Armando has presented work, conducted research, and facilitated workshops and trainings on racism, displacement, migration, and creative expression in the US, Canada, Mexico, and throughout Europe. His creative and community work has been featured in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, C Magazine, and CityLab Latino, and he has also been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

He is a communications fellow at Opportunity Agenda, a Creative Change alum, and has been awarded grants from the Knight Foundation, Puffin Foundation, the Wichita Cultural Funding Committee, and the Kansas Humanities Council.

Carlos Palomino

[ BRAND IDENTITY DESIGNER ]

Carlos Palomino is a graphic designer that has spent the first half of his life in Lima, Peru and the other half in Wichita, KS. Through design, Carlos strives to always tell an interesting story. Whether it’s a brand, a poster, or an illustration; his objective is to provide a creative solution, through a visual or conceptual narrative. Some of his work has been featured by AIGA, the professional association for the design.

For the past 5 years, Carlos has been working with clients and brands such as Vornado, Pixius, Hunter Health Clinic and Wichita State University. His favorite works are community-based entities and projects that give back, such as the North End Urban Arts Festival.

Kylie Brown

[ PROJECT/MEDIA FACILITATION: CREATIVE + WEB ]

Kylie Brown unleashes the power of creativity and communication for communities in the heart of the Midwest. She produces art as a cellist, video director, editor, consultant, web developer, filmmaker, event curator, marketing producer, photographer, and lighting designer.

Kylie is the founder of CreativeRush, a platform for people to learn across all mediums and channel the results into their own work. She has produced wildly popular knowledge sharing events, including Ist TUE Talks, which set the bar for local, independent artistic programming. Her ability to connect people across practices and mediums is evident in much of the collaborative work now taking place in Wichita.

Kylie founded Down to the Wire a 24 HR Film Race, Wichita’s largest community filmmaking event. In 2017, the program attracted 370 filmmakers, an audience of more than 1000 people with The New York Film Critics Series® screening winning films. Kylie is a board member of Fisch Haus and speaks about entrepreneurship, storytelling, and guerrilla filmmaking in high schools and universities.

Dale Small

[ ART DIRECTOR ]

Dale Small is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and photographer. At the intersection of coding, design, and photography, his artistic practice focuses on a deconstructive analysis of our interactions with data, nature, and politics in order to visualize our human experience.

Dale’s work has been shown by the Wichita Arts Council, Carnegie Library, Wichita State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has created work for easyhome Furnishings, Harvester Arts, Trust Women, the Tallgrass Film Association, and Wichita State University.

Dale’s love of portraiture and documentary photography led him to work alongside indigenous Latin American artists in Paraguay during the 1st Biennial of Asunción. He worked with Cuban artist Nestor Siré as an artist assistant and contributed design, photography, and video for works shown in the 2nd Biennial of Asunción.

Louis Goseland

[ ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR ]

Louis Goseland is a community organizer and strategist. Currently, he is based in Bloomington, IL where he is a volunteer organizer for Black Lives Matter Bloomington-Normal.

Louis began his organizing career as a high school student at Wichita High School West, and has contributed to the field of organizing in many capacities. Louis committed his energy to mobilizing Kansans into action while creating a network of powerful organizing vehicles throughout the state, including worker justice centers in Wichita and Lawrence, as well as a statewide PAC and a grassroots political organization.

For over a decade, Louis Goseland has worked as a campus organizer, international consultant, opposition researcher, and regional organizer. Through his work with faith-based communities, labor unions, neighborhood organizations, and student groups as a strategist and organizer. He has shared his knowledge and experience facilitating transformational community organizing with thousands of people across the United States as well as in emerging democracies in Europe.

The Horizontes Portrait Project highlighted 30 community members through a portrait series facilitated by these local photographers from the community. This series is archived at the The Kansas African-American Museum.

Alexis Rivierre - Portrait

Alexis Rivierre

[ ARTIST + PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER ]

Alexis Rivierre is an interdisciplinary artist who creates visual narratives; her practice functions within the expanded field of painting utilizing a range of media from photography to textiles, and performance. In addition to her artist practice Rivierre partners with arts organizations, museums, and universities to develop educational resources and facilitate art workshops and lectures. Rivierre earned her MFA in Studio art with an emphasis in painting at Wichita State University in 2018 and a BFA in Art/Painting, with a minor in Art History from Missouri State University in 2014. Rivierre has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Wayfarers Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, KS), The Kansas Museum (Wichita, KS), and Center [3] Artistic + Social Practice in Ontario, Canada. She was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and currently lives and practices in New York City.
STATEMENT:
Images constructed in film and the broader media possess a social and political power that is used to construct the collective identities of how we perceive ourselves in relationship to those positioned as “the other”. Through an interdisciplinary, fractured, process I create visual narratives that investigate the ways in which the representation of race through language and visual media plays a role in how we are socialized in the United States. My work casts a critical lens on the performative nature of Black womanhood as it relates to our historical placement specifically within the American tale. Rooted in personal narrative I look to representations in film and media to derive sources of inquiry around stereotypes (ie. Jezebel, Angry Black Woman, etc.), the black body as a perceived threat, and managing self-care/ anxiety, to name a few concepts. Utilizing my clothing and personal objects I create masks that are embellished with materials like broken mirror, glass, beads, paint, embroidery, nails, etc. and then engage with an unassuming public through impromptu performative gestures. These characters/ personae are documented in self-portraiture, iPhone selfies, and video and are then paired with cultivated language and appropriated imagery from internet sourced media to create counter-narratives that reconstruct the collective identity while furthering critical discourse, cultivating power and purpose through the reimagined/reclaimed. 

Xavier Leija

[ PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER ]

Xavier Leija is a Wichita native raised on the North Side of Wichita where he attended school graduating from North High in 2007. As a self-taught photographer of 6 years, he has hit many highlights in his photography career from capturing Professional Boxing, Concerts/Festivals, and working in Brand Marketing. Xavier is the moderator of the IGWichita page on Instagram, and a staff photographer at the Cotillion.

Ashwin Govindarajan

[ PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER ]

Ashwin Govindarajan is a Wichita based photographer and recent Biomedical Engineering graduate from Wichita State University. He was born in India, grew up in Alabama, and moved to Wichita at 11 years old. Ashwin’s mother has always been into photography and documenting their lives from India to now. That’s why photography and cameras have always been so familiar to him. He states that it was an art class he took at East High School that truly catalyzed his passion for the medium of photography.

@ashwindle

Juan Garcia

[ PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER ]

Juan Garcia is a Wichita-based photographer and a proud father of one. His start in photography began by exploring infamous neighborhoods in Los Angeles and the low riding subculture. He dreams of one day returning home to California but is compelled to photograph the rest of what the world has to offer. Currently, he is working towards a major in Anthropology and a minor in Political Science at Wichita State University.