(Short) Sandra de la Loza’s transdisciplinary artistic practice investigates the underlayers of our present landscape as a means to open portals and envision future worlds through the exercise of collective memory and political imagination. Working as a performative archivist, she moves critically from and in between the institutional and the social, occupying a variety of sites to interrogate underlying power dynamics and knowledge production through history and memory. Producing video/film, photography, socially engaged performances and events, public interventions and immersive installations, her work has been exhibited in major museums, alternative art spaces and community centers within the United States, Latin America and Europe. Recent exhibitions include the traveling exhibitions: Undoing Time: Histories of Art and Incarceration (2021-2023) and Xicana.o.x Body (2023-2025).
Sandra de la Loza’s transdisciplinary artistic practice investigates the underlayers of our present landscape as a means to open portals and envision future worlds through the exercise of collective memory and political imagination. For the last two decades, her work has approached “History” as site and subject and has grown into archival, social and site-specific investigations that result in video/film, photography, socially engaged performances and events, public interventions and immersive installations. Her interest in the silences, exclusions and erasures of the past is in what it reveals of the present, and how these “ghosts” can make visible erased histories, unlock the imagination, and create counter memories for the future. She was the founder of The Pochx Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, a mock historic society that engaged the subject of “History” through critical inquiry and artistic processes (2002-2007). Working as artist and activist, she has co-created autonomous spaces for artistic production, community action and critical dialogue that center the voices and experiences of people of color including Aztlan Cultural Arts Foundation (1993-1997), Arts in Action (2000-2004), the Northeast Los Angeles Alliance (NELA) (2013-2016), Decolonize LA (2016-2017) and at land’s edge (2016-2018). She is Assistant Professor of Chicana/o/x Studies at the California State University, Northridge. Her work circulates in public and community spaces and major museums locally and internationally. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments (Armory Center for the Arts, 2024) and the traveling exhibitions: Undoing Time: Histories of Art and Incarceration (2021-2023) and Xicana.o.x Body (2023-2025).