STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES 

We are deeply excited to welcome Alan Pelaez Lopez as a resident artist and writer at SAVVY Contemporary. Alan’s residency is the fourth within our  project Standing in the Cracks of Multiple Histories, which investigates the contours of the history of the United States as well as the hegemonic narratives that form and uphold it. Inviting a constellation of voices that emerge from its ruptures, Alan will join us to exchange around their practice. Their dialogues with us will interrogate dominant histories, envision ways to oppose systemic violence, and reimagine collective memory in defense of vulnerable communities.

Over the course of three weeks, Alan will also engage with our current exhibition Historical Children: Lullabies from Wounds to Wonder, and contribute as an artist. They will host an intergenerational workshop with youth within the frameworks of the show, with its outcomes becoming part of the exhibition.

Alan’s work challenges systems of oppression by reimagining kinship, community, and identity through the lenses of Black, Indigenous, migrant, and trans/nonbinary experiences. We look forward to the workshop they will offer, with the aim to create a space for young people to share and uplift their personal and collective stories, struggles, and aspirations – within and beyond the constraints of systemic injustice. Through writing, activism, art-making, and storytelling, Alan’s residency will bridge intergenerational relations, to envision and fight for better presents and futures.

We are honored for this opportunity to get to know each other’s work, and welcome Alan into the research processes and ecosystem of SAVVY Contemporary. As we navigate our own forms of suppression and adverse socio-political pressures, we hope to share methodologies and tools for collective resilience, across ages, learning from struggles in the U.S. and strengthening our ability to confront these challenges, near and far.

Alan Pelaez Lopez born 1993 in Mexico, is a transdisciplinary artist and writer whose work addresses the legal conditions of forced migration and land dispossession in North America. Pelaez Lopez has recently exhibited collages, installations, and intervention art at Harvard University’s Art Wing, Galerija Škuc, EFA Project Space, and in public spaces. They are a recipient of a Brown University Art Practitioner Fellowship, a Museum of the African Diaspora poet-in-residence position, and a New York University Miriam Jiménez Román fellowship. 

Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona, 2023).

They are also an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, and holding a PhD.