Karla Diaz is a writer, teacher, and multidisciplinary artist who engages in painting, installation, video, and performance. Using narrative to question identity, institutional power, and explore memory, her socially engaged practice generates exciting collaborations and provokes important dialogue among diverse communities. Notably, she is the co-founder of the collective and community artist space Slanguage. Critical discourse is central to her practice as she explores social, subcultural, and marginalized stories.
Diaz’s recent work is the result of a year of insomnia. As a stroke survivor, she practices repetitive memory exercises, using drawing as a tool for excavating and retaining information. In her commitment to rendering a painting every night, Diaz turned to the unfiltered, spontaneous imagery that surfaced during her insomnia, whether dreams, fantasies, or memory. In her introspection, splashes of color became figures and objects that transformed into scenes of domesticity and city life drawn from her upbringing in Mexico and Los Angeles. Personal memories, folklore, familiar iconography of her Mexican heritage, and American pop culture are intertwined in surreal compositions that consider family, loss, and the complexities of the Latinx experience in the United States. As Diaz expresses, “these works reveal meaning in relation to others, to experience, to memory, to story, to dreams and dreamers, to imagination and to the larger context of home.”
Diaz was born in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and a BA from California State University Los Angeles in 1999. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Pitzer College, Claremont, CA; California State University Los Angeles, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ; LAXART, Hollywood, CA; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI; Serpentine Galleries, London, U.K.; and Museo Casa de Cervantes, Valladolid, Spain.
She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards from Art Matters, New York, NY; Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY; City of Los Angeles, CA; Riverside Art Museum, CA; and CalArts, Los Angeles, CA.
Her work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; Inhotim Museum, Brumahinto, Brazil; Armando Duron Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Faye Hunter and Hugh Davies Collection, La Jolla, CA; Eileen Harris Norton Collection, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Karla Diaz lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to annouce the acquistions of works by Karla Diaz: Mario, 2023, When my tears fall record, Torera II (Bullfighter) and John Valadez's Aztec Gent. Karla Diaz's surreal paintings chronicle a collective unconscious of cultural iconography, pop references, current events, and familial dynamics and traditions that shape the worldview of the artist and her communities. In Diaz's latest series, she expands her visual storytelling to encompass music and performance through the Northern Mexican genre of narrative ballads, the corrido. John Valadez, a trailblazer of the early Chicano Arts Movement in the 70s and 80s, following the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and 70s, his work has come to define an iconography of Chicano experience in the city by catalyzing its changing dynamics and reconstructing a mythical allegory that speaks to an alternative vision.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce that Karla Diaz has been awarded the Dallas Museum of Art Acquisition Prize for her watercolor and ink painting Torera (Bullfighter), 2023. We are honored to be the beneficiary of this purchase prize which is made possible by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to invite you to an artist talk with June Edmonds, Carla Jay Harris, and Karla Diaz in conjunction with the artists' current solo exhibitions. The talk will be held on Saturday, October 23rd, from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm, followed by a Q&A. This is an in-person event. Seating is limited and reservations are required.
By Jody Zellen
“Her pieces fuse fact and fiction, dreams and reality to create narratives about her experiences growing up and living in Los Angeles.” Karla Diaz has been drawing since she was a child. The title of her current exhibition, “Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” is something her aunt would say to her when she would draw on the walls of the family home. Consisting of 37 paintings and works on paper that, when seen together, become a personal narrative about the many facets of Mexican American identity, Diaz combines figuration and abstraction to explore and revisit her memories of growing up in Los Angeles.
In honor of Women's History Month, we're celebrating the contributions of women throughout art history, including artworks by women from LACMA's collection. In this vibrant watercolor from 2021 entitled Trenzas (Braids), My Alter Ego, Karla Diaz pays homage to her Mexican heritage and the symbolic import of her ancestry through the attributes of her forefathers and foremothers.
The Candlewood Art Festival, named for the fragrant ocotillo that dots the landscpae around Borrego Springs, takes it cues from the generous spirit of the Sky Art sculptures in Galleta Meadows. The festival, meant for audiences of all ages, aims to inspire new ways of seeing and understanding the unique landscape and community of Borrego Springs, for local visitors alike. The artists, who all live and work in Southern California, were chosen for their ability to develop projects that thoughtfully and meaningfully connect with the people and environment of Borrego Springs.
“Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” which is on display at 18th Street Arts Gallery’s Propeller Gallery, is an exploration of American Mexican identity from the 1970s through today via the paper and canvas work of artist Karla Diaz. Called her first institutional solo exhibition in Greater L.A., the exhibition features 37 of the writer, teacher and multidisciplinary artist’s new and recent works. At the heart of the exhibition is “The Silver Dollar” (2021), a work on paper that commemorates Ruben Salazar, the L.A. Times reporter and columnist — the city’s leading Latino media voice — who was killed in August 1970 when a sheriff’s deputy shot a projectile into East L.A. bar the Silver Dollar.
Step into the world of artist Karla Diaz at 18th Street Art Center. Her vibrant paintings in "Wait 'til Your Mother Gets Home" draw inspiration from everyday experiences, pulling you into swap meets, protests, and familiar domestic spaces. This introspective exploration delves into the beauty of the ordinary, reminding us how seemingly mundane moments shape our lives.
Just as LA celebrates its annual fair week, the pinnacle of the commercial art ecosystem, several shows across the city take a different approach, offering alternative creative visions and celebrating the abject, the margins, the forgotten.
With a vibrant palette and crisp lines reminiscent of comic books, Diaz’s paintings combine childhood recollections of Mexico and LA, domestic family scenes, pop culture, fantasy, and dreams with a focus on social justice, a crucial part of Slanguage, the community art space she co-founded with her husband, Mario Ybarra Jr., in 2002.
Slanguage has since become a crucial community resource and a platform for emerging artists, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, rooted in the idea that reflecting on the nuances of one’s life—however ubiquitous and ordinary they might seem—can both provide a sturdy foundation and abundant terrain for artistic inspiration. Diaz has applied that notion of introspection to her own painting practice, especially in the new works she created her show at 18th Street Art Center. The show’s title, “Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” nods to a warning Diaz heard all the time in her Mexican American household growing up, particularly since she had a proclivity for drawing on the walls as a child. With equal parts whimsy and clarity, Diaz depicts the likes of swap meets, protests, and bedrooms, tapping into the disparate places and people that, crucially, make a life.
18th Street Arts Center is now showing Karla Diaz: Wait ‘til Your Mother Gets Home, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the Los Angeles area. The exhibition consists of 37 new and recent works on paper and paintings, along with an installation that commemorates Rubén Salazar, the civil rights activist and Los Angeles Times reporter murdered in 1970.
The title of the exhibition, “wait ‘til your mother gets home,” is a familiar expression Diaz heard frequently from her aunt, who stayed with her after school as a young girl. Toggling between the domestic sphere and the world at large, the phrase suggests a conflation of past and future that is familiar to Diaz. Her artworks operate simultaneously in multiple worlds, those of her dreams as well as the everyday.
As a child, Diaz got in trouble for drawing on walls. "Wait 'til your mother gets home!" her aunt would yell. That rebellious spirit stayed with the writer, teacher and multidisciplinary artist who dedicates her craft to uplifting the voices of marginalized people.
In her writing, painting, video, performance and installation practice, artist Karla Diaz tells kaleidoscopic stories of introspection, memory, and identity. With an irrepressible love of pure color, syncopated pattern and rich textures arrayed in luminous layers, Diaz combines portraits, landscapes, scenic vignettes, and glowing aspects of dreamlike abstraction.
The Dallas Museum of Art has scoured the world for works of art to grace its walls and galleries. But Thursday it announced 12 acquisitions it made from its own back yard—this year’s Dallas Art Fair, which is open to ticketed attendees today through Sunday, April 23, at the Fashion Industry Gallery in the downtown Dallas Arts District. The team chose to acquire 12 artworks by nine artists: Chelsea Culprit, Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Karla Diaz, Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Riley Holloway, Yifan Jiang, Yowshien Kuo, Masamitsu Shigeta, and Nishiki Sugawara-Beda.
The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) will welcome 12 new works into its permanent collection at no cost thanks to an acquisition fund that allows the museum to select work from dealers taking part in the Dallas Art Fair. Works acquired by the museum with through the fund this year also include... Karla Diaz’s watercolour painting Torera (bullfighter) (2023) from Luis de Jesus Los Angeles.
Twelve artworks from this year’s Dallas Art Fair will be added to the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Artworks are from Chelsea Culprit, Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Karla Diaz, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, Riley Holloway, Yifan Jiang, Yowshien Kuo, Masamitsu Shigeta and Nishiki Sugawara-Beda.
For many, Lucha Libre represents something more personal and intimate. Karla Diaz’s “Las Dos Luchas/The Double Fight” (2022), from a series of new watercolors created for the exhibition, features scenes from the artist’s life punctuated with scenes from lucha. Made after she underwent brain surgery, these paintings illustrate the Diaz’s healing journey as she began to recover her memories.
November in Los Angeles brings us shows that highlight art’s role as both a reflection of everyday life and a force to help change our reality. An exhibition at Angels Gate Cultural Center showcases the multifaceted programs of the community-based Slanguage Studio. Shows at the Vincent Price Art Museum and Skirball Cultural Center highlight the potential of art to memorialize and record our histories.
Founded 20 years ago by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz, Slanguage Studio opened its doors to the community of Wilmington as an artist-run space. Slanguage has since expanded its creative teachings, aspirations, and community engagement globally to creatives, innovators, and teachers of all backgrounds. We Run Things, Things Don’t Run We is an homage and oeuvre of many generations that have contributed to the history, community-centric values, conscious intent/ content and intergenerational, alternative learning space of Slanguage Studio.
Occupying the opposite pole of painting are the socially engaged works of Karla Diaz at the Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus (Booth 5.03). Diaz’s deep, color-saturated canvases tell personal stories of migration from Mexico to the United States, as well as preserve folklore from her heritage.
A man dressed in brown stands before a row of trees, the color of his garments and the sturdiness of his posture evoking the solidity of the forest behind him. To his left, a fire eater spits flames into a tangerine sky. If this all sounds like a dream, well, it is. “El ´Árbol y el Tragafuegos” — “The Tree and the Fire Eater,” in English — was painted by Los Angeles artist Karla Diaz and it emerges from her dreams and her memories. The tree-man? That’s her, as a figure she once embodied in a dream. The fire eater was inspired by “Dragón,” a man — and actual fire eater — she knew from her family’s native village in the Mexican state of Colima. His real name was José and he hoped to one day become a truck driver.
It was in an unlikely place to contemplate art where Karla Diaz, co-founder of Wilmington-based art collective Slanguage, began to formulate the idea behind the current exhibit at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum. At the law offices where some of the museum’s collection hangs—including several second wave abstract expressionist pieces—Diaz noticed how some employees’ desk decorations matched the colors of the paintings and how even their clothes complemented the works.
Karla Diaz and her partner, Mario Ybarra Jr., believe community involvement is crucial to art. That’s easy to see in the couple’s current exhibition at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, which makes viewers part of the conversation right from the title: Call and Response, When We Say…You Say. Diaz and Ybarra are co-founders of the Wilmington-based art collective, Slanguage. This exhibit, which opened Jan. 28, connects pop culture and high art to highlight the conversations that occur between art pieces, artists, and patrons.
Tamales fashioned from crushed Doritos. Grilled cheese sandwiches turned golden brown with a hot clothing iron. Brownies formed from crushed cookies, candy bars and hot coffee. Samples of these dishes were handed out to a dinnertime crowd gathered at the Sister Hearts Thrift Store on West Judge Perez Drive in Arabi on Monday (May 22), during the "Prison Gourmet: New Orleans Cook-Off." A group of women, all formerly incarcerated, re-created the dishes they had made in their prison dormitories, using whatever tools they had and food purchased from the commissary or stolen from the prison kitchen. The evening was co-sponsored by Los Angeles artist Karla Diaz and Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, which is planning a major exhibition in spring 2018, focusing on Louisiana's high incarceration rate.
In a city known for its vibrant food culture, some New Orleans' culinary traditions receive scant attention. That includes the enterprising recipes developed and shared by prison inmates.The Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, in partnership with Los Angeles artist Karla Diaz, wants to bring attention to dishes created by formerly incarcerated women in the upcoming workshop "Prison Gourmet: New Orleans Cook-Off" at Sister Hearts Thrift Store in Arabi.
Karla Diaz is not a chef, but she's gained a dedicated following for the food she makes. A performance artist in Los Angeles, Diaz has spent the past six years demonstrating how to cook dishes like tamales made out of of Cheetos, soup from Corn Nuts and pork rinds, and orange chicken made with instant ramen and strawberry jelly. She doesn't use a stove, a blender, or conventional utensils—just tools that can be built out of trash bags and toilet paper, and ingredients she would find if she were incarcerated. She calls it "prison gourmet."
Karla Diaz is an activist, artist, writer and one of the founders of the artist group Slanguage Studio. A couple of years ago, she got interested in the prison food system in California and in particular in the prisoners’ ingenious strategies to overcome the culinary flaws of the CDCR cafeterias. It turns out that prisoners create their own recipes using the limited list of ingredients they can buy either from the jail commissary or the vending machines. The men also design kitchen tools using whatever is available to them and make some unconventional mixtures of ingredients to create their own unique flavours.
“Possible Worlds,” a new installation of objects from the collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, adheres to a now familiar format, blurring the line between curating and art making. Artists Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz (of the artists’ collaborative Slanguage) created the installation as part of a residency at Watts House Project, an artist-driven urban revitalization initiative near Simon Rodia’s iconic Watts Towers. A more complicated back story is hard to imagine, and the danger of course, is that the show relies too heavily on a context well outside the museum walls. However, it ends up being less about Watts or community art than a reflection on how they might influence the museum.
South Bay style was on display last night when Wilmington's own media and arts collective, Slanguage, took curatorial control of MOCA's Thursday night Engagement Party series with its Psychicinema Multiplex. Founded in 2002 by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra Jr., and based in the harbor area of L.A. specifically to cultivate relationships between diverse audiences there, Slanguage has unleashed its experimental, street art approach on venues like the Tate Modern Museum and Serpentine Gallery in London, to LACMA, to Boston public schools — and now MOCA, where Slanguage's visual assault included screenings and projections throughout the courtyard and galleries, with psychic dancers, DJs, palm readers and a prom-style portrait studio with Wilmington's hellish refineries as the backdrop.