The Loft Hour: Chris Batterman Cháirez + Cathy Lu

Chris Batterman Cháirez is an ethnographer, anthropologist, and ethnomusicologist from Mexico City. His work deals with the intercalations of music, difference, and power in Latin America, and with the affective and social dimensions of governance for subjects that sit on the edges of the nation-state. His long-term research commitments are in Michoacán, Mexico. Currently, he is working on his first book tentatively titled Pirekua’s Traces. The book takes pirekua, an Indigenous music from the P’urhépecha region of Michoacán, as an entryway to consider the deranged and fractured temporalities of Indigenous life under Mexico’s neoliberal multiculturalism. He is developing a second book project on the pervasive media ecosystems of cartel violence in western Mexico. He was a professional jazz musician in a past life and has lived and worked as a musician in Atlanta, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. He has performed, toured, and recorded in a variety of styles with artists from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Korea. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 2025 as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology.

Cathy Lu creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work. Lu received a BA and BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently Assistant Professor of Ceramics at UC Berkeley. She has participated in artist-in-residence programs at Kohler Arts Center, Bemis Center for the Arts, Recology San Francisco, Greenwich House Pottery NYC, and the Archie Bray Foundation. Her work has been exhibited widely, at The Armory Show, New York, NY; Art Basel Hong Kong; SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Center, Chinese Culture Center, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Kadist, Kala Arts Center, Manetti Shrem Museum, Root Division, all in the Bay Area, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Prospect 6 New Orleans; Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong; MCA Denver. Lu was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow, and is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner. Lu’s work has recently been included in the collection of the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Kadist, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.