Beatriz Escobar & Berta
Beatriz Escobar is an artist and educator working primarily with participatory art projects, relational objects, and the body, engaging decolonial imaginaries and investigating how embodied knowledge interacts with the experience of otherness. She is interested in the tensions arising from the excessive consumption of the tropical (tropical culture, bodies and resources) by The Global North and is constantly entangling herself and the audience in constructed and shifting power dynamics. As part of her practice, she has been creating platforms for local artists to present new work, such as the Draw The Line Residency, a residency for artists without formal art education, the four iterations of Performance Art Night (with the collective called useless initiatives), where visual artists experiment with live performance, and Emergent Landscapes, a platform for site-specific work in natural landscapes by POC artists (with collaborator Anna Xu). Escobar grew up in São Paulo, is now based in the Bay Area and holds an MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts, where she received the Impact Awards 2017 for her project Amazonas Riverine Program. She was a 2017-2018 Creative Dissent Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a 2018-2019 Community Engagement Fellow at Destiny Arts Center, and is currently an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts.
Berta lives in the Castro district in San Francisco, and was born and raised in El Salvador. She finds artistic expression in multiple ways. She has been a professional seamstress and enjoys making dresses for herself and others. Berta is passionate about dance and music, which feels liberating to her since she was not allowed to enjoy and experience these artforms when she was young. Her secret to living an active life at the age of 93 is "rice and beans every day".
