Artists’ Reception: La LUCHA / de la Torre Brothers

La LUCHA / de la Torre Brothers: Turbulent Times and Works by Los Angeles Chicano Artists

Curated by: Hannah Sloan (in collaboration with Eleana Del Rio of Koplin Del Rio and Jeannie Denholm of SCAPE)

October 15 - November 14
Artists’ Reception: Saturday, October 24, 6-8 PM

The de la Torre Brothers and other artists will be in attendance.

SCAPE Annex presents La Lucha, a pop-up exhibition pairing Turbulent Times, a selection of glass and lenticular works by Einar and Jamex de la Torre, with a complementary group of works by Los Angeles Chicano artists, curated by Hannah Sloan. The exhibition coincides with the brothers’ ambitious immersive exhibition The Tipping Point at Laguna Art Museum, on view through January 24, 2027.

Alongside the de la Torre Brothers, curator Hannah Sloan brings together works by seminal Los Angeles Chicano artists Judithe Hernández and Gilbert “Magu” Luján, both members of the landmark collective Los Four, as well as José Lozano, with works by a younger generation of artists including Victor Reyes, Javier Carrillo, William Camargo, Francisco Palomares, and Jacqueline Valenzuela.

About the Artists

Brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre were born in Guadalajara, Mexico. In 1972, a sudden family move took them from a traditional Catholic school in Mexico to the small Southern California beach town of Dana Point. Both studied at California State University, Long Beach, and have taught at the renowned Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State. Today, they live and work on both sides of the border, in Baja California’s Guadalupe Valley and in San Diego. The contradictions of the immigrant experience and bicultural identity remain central to their practice.

Collaborating since the 1990s, the brothers have developed a distinctive visual language encompassing mixed media, blown glass, installation, photomurals, and lenticular printing. Their approach is additive, layering material upon meaning in a humorous, multilayered baroque that draws on religious iconography, German Expressionism, Mexican vernacular arts, and Pre-Columbian art. Together, they have received a United States Artists Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation award.

Judithe Hernández and Gilbert “Magu” Luján were members of Los Four, the influential Chicano art collective that became the first Chicano artist group to receive a major exhibition at a mainstream American museum. Hernández, a muralist central to the 1970s East Los Angeles renaissance, has spent five decades developing a vivid, mythic visual language in pastel. In 2024, she became the first artist to receive a major retrospective at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. Luján (1940–2011) created a playful cosmology he called Magulandia, populated by pyramid-mounted lowriders driven by anthropomorphic dogs and inhabited by a mythologized Los Angeles.

José Lozano (1959–2025) was a celebrated painter and draftsman whose work explored the cultural interplay between Mexico and Southern California. Born in Los Angeles and raised partly in Ciudad Juárez, he developed a visual language shaped by Mexican popular culture, everyday life, humor, and memory. His paintings and prints are populated by dense crowds, lucha libre masks, and sharply observed scenes of human comedy.

Javier Carrillo, who leads the printmaking program at Art Division in Los Angeles, paints the work trucks of immigrant laborers, piled high with mattresses, tools, ladders, and the materials of a day’s work. Carrillo sees these overloaded vehicles as modern-day beasts of burden, carrying the weight of the labor that builds and sustains Southern California. His paintings render them with both reverence and affection.

Victor Reyes fuses Indigenous cosmology, Chicano culture, and the urban landscape of Los Angeles in phantasmagorical narratives where the past is not erased but transformed. For Reyes, lowriders “function as sacred vessels, chariots, time machines and ceremonial carriers, like ritual masks or secret objects.” Following the legacy of Chicano artists Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert Luján, he creates his own mythic cast of jaguar women, warrior cholos, and hybrid figures who “function as protectors and witnesses of everyday people trying to embody resilience and strength.”

Jacqueline Valenzuela grew up watching lowriders cruise Whittier Boulevard. She sees a kinship between the ornate, bedazzled Catholic church and the lowrider’s extravagant chrome and glittering paint: both embrace flamboyance and are rooted in acts of veneration. Working with auto paint, faux fur, and other materials associated with the custom shop, she creates mixed-media works she considers reliquaries, carrying “histories of labor, family, aspiration and cultural knowledge passed between generations.”

Artist Talk: Katie Shapiro & Virginia Arce

Join us Saturday, October 24 at 11:00 am for a conversation with the artist.

Artists Katie Shapiro and Virgina Arce will discuss influences that have shaped her new work including Jungian psychology, autobiography, geology, memory, and matter. 

About the Artists

Virginia Arce is a curator, writer, and arts advocate. Her curatorial practice centers emerging contemporary artists and has spanned artist-run, municipal, nonprofit, and academic spaces. She is a co-founder and co-editor of The Invisible Archive, and in 2024, was named Emerging Arts Leader by ArtsOC. She earned her MFA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of California, Irvine.  

Katie Shapiro’s (b. 1983, Los Angeles, CA) practice explores the ineffable—making visible what cannot be seen. Her most recent work reflects her ongoing investigation into perception, presence, and what lies beyond view. The artist writes:

“Through my work, I aim to create evocative, multi-layered pieces that reflect the complexity of human existence across personal, historical, and cosmic dimensions. I combine my photographic practice with sculptural elements, blurring the lines between image and object, surface and structure. This material expansion allows me to craft immersive environments that challenge conventional boundaries and invite a more tactile, spatial engagement with visual media.

Sculpture, for me, is not simply about form—it is a way of embodying the unseen. By integrating photography with physical materials such as wood, obsidian, and mirrors, I explore how material presence can hold and transmit intangible states: memory, emotion, energy, and psychological depth. The works often draw from natural topographies—energy vortices, impact craters, high mountain elevations—which act as metaphors for the internal landscapes we all carry. These geologic markers mirror our own transformations, holding space for rupture, resilience, and rebirth.

Motherhood has profoundly shaped my artistic inquiry. It has attuned me more acutely to the liminal, intuitive, and cyclical aspects of life—the quiet, often unseen labor of care and creation. As both a personal and archetypal experience, motherhood introduces an expanded awareness of time, space, and bodily knowledge. It offers a lived experience of duality: being both self and other, grounded and dissolving, nurturing and fiercely protective. This duality echoes in my work, where form and image coalesce to explore the unconscious currents that flow beneath everyday reality.”

Update /

Sessions are fully booked. If you’d like to schedule a one-on-one portfolio review outside of Office Hours, please reach out to Hannah at hannah@hannahsloan.com

Join curator and advisor Hannah Sloan for in-person portfolio reviews at our Mid-City gallery.

When: Sunday, October 18, 2026

Where: 5613 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019

70-minute one-on-one sessions | $325 per session

If you are interested but don't see availability that matches your schedule or would like to discuss payment options, please reach out to Hannah at hannah@hannahsloan.com.

Sign-up deadline: Monday, October 12

Katie Shapiro: The Other Side of the Moon

Reception for the Artist : Saturday, September 26 from 3-5 PM

Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory
5613 San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90019

Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory is pleased to present The Other Side of the Moon, a solo exhibition of photo-based works by Katie Shapiro, on view from September 26 – November 14, 2026. In her most autobiographical body of work to date, Shapiro uses photography as sculpture to explore psychological spaces and life experiences that resist straightforward representation. Photographs of landscapes, celestial bodies, and intimate moments with her adolescent sons are printed on glass, arranged in mirrored frames, and placed into geologic specimens like obsidian and jade, giving a robust, three-dimensional presentation to her ideas about interior life.

Join curator and advisor Hannah Sloan for in-person portfolio reviews at our Mid-City gallery.

When: Sunday, September 20, 2026

Where: 5613 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019

70-minute one-on-one sessions | $325 per session

If you are interested but don't see availability that matches your schedule or would like to discuss payment options, please reach out to Hannah at hannah@hannahsloan.com.

Sign-up deadline: Monday, September 14

Bergamot Station Art Tours
/ FALL OPEN HOUSE

Saturday, September 12
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404

Tour 1 / 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Tour 2 / 3:00 - 4:30 PM

Join curator and advisor Hannah Sloan for a guided walkthrough of current exhibitions at Bergamot Station Arts Center during their Fall Open House. This season’s tours spotlight a dynamic mix of emerging and established artists across participating galleries.

Each tour offers an engaging look at select exhibitions and the voices shaping today’s contemporary art landscape.

Two tours will be held, one starting at 12:00 pm, the second at 3:00 pm.
Spaces are limited. Tours are free and open to the public, but RSVP is required.

Participating Galleries:

bG Gallery
Copro Gallery
Craig Krull Gallery
Marshall Gallery
Nüart Gallery
Peter Fetterman Gallery / Galerie XII
Richard Heller Gallery
SANTA MONICA AUCTIONS
ROSEGALLERY
Von Lintel Gallery
William Turner Gallery

Mini Market Saturday

June 27 / 11am-5pm

5613 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019

A summer pop-up market for makers, artisans & vintage sellers.

/ About

We're officially kicking off summer with a one-day mini market on Saturday, June 27, 11 AM to 5 PM. The weather in Mid-City has been particularly gorgeous, and our patio is calling for a pop-up shopping afternoon with some of our favorite returning vendors.

Come for the vintage, the ceramics, an updated astrological reading, and the chance to spend time with Erina Libertad: Lo que queda (What Remains), her playful new installation.

Celebrate summer with us in the Mid-City community.

Vendors

/ Nandi Ceramics

/ Market Vintage

/ Lynette Vintage

/ Astrology Readings by Becky Joiner

Also on view: a brand new haul of functional ceramics by Bella Marinos

Free street parking, open to the public.

Bergamot Station Art Tours
/ SPRING OPEN HOUSE

Join curator and advisor Hannah Sloan for a guided walkthrough of current exhibitions at Bergamot Station Arts Center during their Spring Open House. This season’s tours spotlight a dynamic mix of emerging and established artists across participating galleries.

Each tour offers an engaging look at select exhibitions and the voices shaping today’s contemporary art landscape.

Spaces are limited. Tours are free and open to the public, but RSVP is required.

Participating Galleries:

bG Gallery
CoproGallery
Craig Krull Gallery
Galerie XII
Marshall Contemporary
Nüart Gallery
Richard Heller Gallery
Robert Berman Gallery
ROSEGALLERY
Von Lintel Gallery
William Turner Gallery