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In collaboration with Montalvo Arts Center (Montalvo), artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza will create Creando Espacio/Place Making: Immigration, Rituals and Transitoriness. This installation on the Montalvo grounds will represent a space of healing, contemplation, memory, and collaboration. It will highlight the loneliness and isolation often felt by immigrant communities, while seeking to open up a positive, healing dialogue that explores rituals practiced by peoples from Mexico, and Central and South America as they prepare for the long and challenging migratory journey to the United States. Also participating will be San Francisco-based artist Viviana Paredes, who incorporates medicinal elements within her glass pieces, and artist-curator Amalia Mesa-Bains.

Given that community helps to alleviate loneliness, the collaborators seek to create a sense of belonging for local immigrant communities at the installation, and will present artist talks, hands-on workshops, musical performances, and other activities at the site.

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Montalvo’s mission is to engage people in the creative process, act as a catalyst for exploring the arts, unleash creativity, and advance different cultural and cross-cultural perspectives. It creates and presents art of all types and uses its 175-acre historic property and public park to serve some 250,000 visitors a year.

Born in Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico, Hector Dionicio Mendoza relocated to the agricultural community of King City, California in the mid-1980s. He currently lives in Monterey and is a professor in the Visual and Public Art Department at CSU, Monterey Bay.