Aquí, Escuchar (Here, Hear)

This exhibition invites a deliberate, sustained experience with the work on display. Through her installations, imagery, and material artifacts, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas constructs environments rich with symbolism, identity, and lived experience. Her process draws from the intersecting histories of Latina activism, feminism, and the politicized female body.

Throughout the exhibition, Meza-DesPlas confronts and reconsiders familiar imagery. Cultural stereotypes and symbols of femininity — lace bras and long hair — are not simply referenced. They are dismantled, reassembled, and reasserted through a new lens. Central to her process is the artist’s use utilization of her own hair. This recurring use breaks down the boundary between maker and object. As both material and artifact, it signals intimacy, labor, and the literal inclusion of the artist’s body into the work. Rather than offering a singular narrative, this exhibition embraces multiplicity. The experiences of women are neither fixed nor uniform, and activism emerges across generations, identities, and lived realities. In this space, these histories, stories, and ideas exist together, making room for complexity and coexistence. Rosemary Meza-DesPlas’ work is a record of recognition. Labor. History. Age. Identity. When women, visible to the world or not, gather and persist, they enact change.