The Loft Hour: Xandra Ibarra + Matthew Evan Taylor

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects. Ibarra’s work has been featured at The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), ONE Archives (LA) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few.  She is currently a UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Eureka Fellow. She has received the Creative Capital Award, the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, the Art Matters Grant, the Eisner Film and Video Prize, the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award among others. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, ArtNews and in various academic journals and books nationally and internationally. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE! and Survived and Punished, both national feminist of color organizations dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence.  As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, Art Practice/Studio and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses at various Universities. Past adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: Stanford University, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts.  Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and attended the Post Colonial Studies program held at the Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. https://www.xandraibarra.com/

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as a “risk taker” (Neil De La Flor, Huffington Post), who has “…wrestled with the societal boundaries of Black artistry only to blast them apart…” (Dr. Kori Hill, I Care if You Listen) by making music that is “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). His work includes concert music, such as okussa: for Damascus (2023, commissioned by the Next Festival for Emerging Artists) for string orchestra; chamber music like Get Up! (2022, commissioned by Timothy McAllister) for alto saxophone and piano; online streaming projects, most notably Postcards to the Met (2021 – 2022, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art) which has accrued over 500,000 views on Instagram and free improvisations as in his acclaimed Unheard Mixtapes (2020 – 2021, commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble; New Amsterdam Records). Dr. Taylor calls his recent work AfroPnuemaism: a liberatory practice that centers the human breath as a primary organizational structure of music. These compositions subvert the accepted assumptions of virtuosity, precision, and the sublime while harnessing the breathing process as a means to celebrate the humanity of performers and their witnesses.

Anne Walsh is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer. She frequently engages collaborators in the retelling of histories and the translating of texts. This process of making, with its risks, desires, and failures, gives unstable shape to her completed work. She received her MFA in Art at the California Institute of Arts, and her B.A. in Art History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Anne Walsh teaches Video Art, Performance Art, Creative Writing, and Graduate Seminars.